Corea del Sur:

sinergia de industrias culturales y turismo

Abstract

The Republic of Korea, also known as South Korea, belongs to a peninsula that lies between two gigantic countries –China and Japan-, already popular by themselves. Although Korea has many important historical, architectural and natural sites, those are usually shrouded by Korea’s powerful country neighbors. Nevertheless, Korea has been able to impulse a particular phenomenon of recent appearance that –without being intentional at first- has caused a progressive interest over the country, its culture and traditions, giving birth to non-conventional tours. This phenomenon is called hallyu (korean wave), which contains a variety of south korean cultural industries -focused on audiovisual contents- that after conquering the Asian region is moving fast towards Europe and America, followed by an unusual fervor. The fame achieved by these cultural industries soon helped to develop parallel activities like gastronomy and tourism. And taking this last industry, we can observe the implementation of related tourist itineraries (record companies, TV stations, filming sets, etc). The Korea Tourism Organization quickly understood the importance of capitalizing this phenomenon to promote the country abroad and dedicated itself to outline strategies specifically for the consuming audience of cultural industries. The Koren Peninsula has been implicated in cruel wars and occupations throughout the first half of the 20th century, and those events left her absolutely devastated. Cultural industries and their impact in other markets, therefore, help Korea in the process of building and exporting a technological and modern image, without leaving aside her millenary culture. The objective of the present paper is to offer an approach to the hallyu phenomenon, explaining its meaning and role in the creation and design of new itineraries and cultural roads related to music and TV dramas, understanding the possibilities of replicating the model in any other country with similar potential.