Hoa Lo Prison draws tourists during holiday break

Visitors line up to buy tickets at Hoa Lo Prison Relic, May 2, 2023. Photo by VnExpress/Anh Tu

Hoang Anh, who is in her 20s, just visited Hanoi with a group of friends for the recent five-day holiday for Reunification Day and Labor Day.

Spending two days in the capital, Anh and her friends from northern Quang Ninh Province, spent most of their time checking in at places popular among the young, with Hoa Lo Prison the only tourist hotspot they visited.

“I like how history is told through photos and the condensed information here. The venue lured quite a large number of tourists but I still had an impressive experience,” Anh said.

“My friends and I used the automatic narration service during the tour to understand more about the place.”

Hoa Lo’s management board said the relic attracted 8,000 on April 30, and even more on May 1, about four times higher than on normal days.

On Tuesday, many had to queue to enter the prison.

Philip, a German living in Hanoi, said he had read many books about Hoa Lo but wanted to see it for himself.

“I felt heavy but those stories really helped me learn more about the past,” he said, adding that he hoped more foreign tourists would check it out in the future.

Philip, a German living in Hanoi, wears a headphone as he listens to an automatic narrative at Hoa Lo Prison Relic, May 2, 2023. Photo by VnExpress/Anh Tu

Coming from the U.K., Doug and his family went to Hoa Lo on Tuesday.

He said he knew nothing about the relic but decided to go after seeing it on a tourism brochure.

The site impressed him with the arrangement of two different periods: fighting the French and fighting the Americans.

The prison was built by the French in 1896 to house 450 prisoners but up to 2,000 were kept there. It was one of France’s biggest prisons in Indochina.

It was used during the Vietnam War to detain U.S. prisoners of war. The late Senator John McCain was a prisoner of war at Hoa Lo for more than five years.

Earlier, the French colonial administration incarcerated Vietnamese revolutionaries there.

Hoa Lo was demolished in the 1990s but part of it was retained.