Known as the butterfly capital of Korea, Korea’s southern city of Hampyeong is visited by more than 10,000 butterflies every year. To celebrate the importance of its winged visitor, Hampyeong has scheduled the fifth annual Butterfly Festival for May 3-11, 2003. Nearly one million people attended last year’s festival, making it one of Korea’s most popular events.

Designed to delight and inform the casual visitor, the feature exhibit during the festival is the Butterfly Ecology Pavilion, an indoor exhibition which houses as many as 60,000 butterflies from around Korea, representing nearly 70 species and 4 families. The beautifully landscaped pavilion is also the home of more than 100 types of plants and 600 types of flowers and native trees. The adjacent Butterfly & Specimen Gallery features an extensive display of rare and extinct butterflies from around the world and on display are some 30,000 butterflies representing 250 species from Korea. An additional 10,000 specimens hail from North Korea, while another 5,000 specimens originate from countries around the world. The exhibition also pays tribute to 34 plants and animals that have been designated as endangered species, and features 1,000 live insects. The Outdoor Experience Area will serve as the hands-on activity site and includes demonstrations of natural dyeing techniques, thread spinning and ceramic painting. Finally, frogs, turtles and diving beetles strut their stuff in a “petting zoo” format. Music, dancing, and traditional performances round out the festivities.

Hampyeong is known throughout Korea as an environmentally friendly and ecologically forward thinking city, with a clean environment, diverse ecological biosystems and seemingly unlimited fields of wildflowers. Hampyeong also features a large concentration of the very endangered Orange Whiskered Bat. Recent reports have only located ten such bats through southern China, Taiwan and Japan combined, while a recent Hampyeong sighting at an abandoned mine counted as many as 87 bats. The bats have been classified as endangered, due to their unnaturally balanced gender ratio of 40 males to each female. Because of the cities high concentration of butterflies, insects and other animals, Hampyeong City has developed a unique website which is particularly useful for the budding scientist. The site offers a complete overview, including photos, habitats, eating patterns and migratory habits of 300 butterflies, 350 insects and almost 200 animals, Other ecological visitor attractions in Hampyeong include the Insect Institute, the Gosmo Bay Tidal Flats, the Khonmurent Flower Park, especially lovely in September when the Khonmurent are in full bloom; Moaksan Mountain; and the Freshwater Fish Ecology Hall of Korea. For more information about visiting Hampyeong City or the Butterfly Festival, visit their website at www.inabi.or.kr or visit the KNTO website at www.tour2korea.com.