The waterfall does not stop making sound at night either. The 25th Seogwipo Cheonjiyeon Summer Music Festival opens on Friday, August 21, on the outdoor stage at Cheonjiyeon Falls in Seogwipo, Jeju. It is put together as a performance that plays summer night music over the sound of the falling water. This is its twenty-fifth summer.
Instead of building a new stage, the organizers took the whole scenery where the waterfall stands and made it the venue.
Nights at Cheonjiyeon are damp. The black rock cliff takes the water and moans low, and the spray spreads like fog and reaches the seats. The smell of wet moss and bark mixes into the summer air.
No matter how far the sound equipment is pushed, this water noise cannot be erased. Rather than enduring the water, the players come to choose the method of laying their notes on top of it.
Using natural scenery as a venue comes at a price. When people come in, light comes in, and sound is amplified. For the creatures living around the waterfall, a loudspeaker on a summer night is not an easy guest to welcome. Over twenty-five years, as the same event has been repeated in the same place, the work of clearing up and putting things back has been repeated twenty-five times as well.
For the people of Seogwipo, this music festival has settled into an evening outing at the tail end of summer. It has a different feel from the kind of music experience where you buy a ticket and travel to a large concert hall. You walk down to the water, sit, and the performance begins.
Because it is an outdoor performance, the weather has to be watched. Evening rain in Jeju in summer pours without warning and then stops. Bringing one thin outer layer makes it easier to sit for a long time.
The twenty-fifth stage opens tomorrow. The waterfall will pour with the same sound that day, and the audience will sit in the middle of that sound. You just walk into Cheonjiyeon Falls in Seogwipo, Jeju.
Event Information
Date: Opens Friday, August 21, 2026
Venue: Outdoor stage at Cheonjiyeon Falls, Seogwipo, Jeju
