Boseong Green Tea Festival

Held each May in Boseong County, on South Korea's southwestern coast, the Green Tea Festival has run since 1985 and stands as the country's representative celebration of tea culture, timed precisely to coincide with the harvest of haetcha, the season's first, most prized tea leaves. Boseong's particular combination of high humidity and ample rainfall has made it Korea's premier tea-growing region, home to the country's largest tea plantation at Daehan Dawon.

The festival gives visitors a genuinely hands-on introduction to Korean tea culture, with traditional tea ceremonies, leaf-picking sessions in the rolling plantation terraces, and workshops teaching the full process from harvest to finished cup. Beyond the ceremonial side, Boseong's tea works its way into a surprising range of dishes served throughout the festival, including green tea-infused pork belly, green tea noodles and green tea ice cream, giving visitors a chance to taste the crop in forms well beyond a simple brewed cup.

For visitors interested in Korean tea culture specifically, distinct from the country's more widely documented fermented and grilled food traditions, Boseong's festival offers a genuinely serene counterpart — rolling green terraces at dawn, and a harvest tradition that has been celebrated in exactly this spot for four decades.