Sunset Chasing TaiwanSunset spots › Greater Taipei › Keelung & Northeast Coast
Photo: Curtis Starkey
Keelung Mountain
基隆山
Tonight’s sky score in the app →
Hike: Not too hard but a bit steep
Getting there & back
Is tonight worth it at Keelung Mountain?
The app scores every spot from the forecast at its own sunset hour, with the seven-day outlook and the last train home. Six spots are free.
The spot
In Ruifang you’ll find one of the most popular tourist spots in all of Taiwan, Jiufen. But just a few minutes’ walk from the historical Jiufen Old Street is the entrance to the Keelung Mountain Trail. A 30-40 minute hike (mostly stairs) will get you to the top of not just this mountain, but you’ll also be towering above the entire northern Taiwan seaside.
You will be able to see Keelung Harbor, Keelung Islet, and Heping Island to the north, as well as Bitoujiao to the south. You can also see over the mountains to Xizhi and on clear days, all the way to Taipei 101 on the horizon. A bonus: this is a popular place to take pictures of the beautiful hills of Jiufen, especially at night when all of Jiufen’s lights turn on.
On top of the mountain there is a viewing platform with a near-360 viewing angle. There are also other platforms and angles to view the coastal scenery on the way up/down.
The hike itself is a bit steep, but it’s well worth it to make it to the very top. Getting down after dark is a bit of an adventure – be sure to bring a headlamp/flashlight!
Besides the faint light from adjacent Jiufen, it’s very very dark. And at least when I went in summer, the trail was surrounded with tall miscanthus plants, and it had the feel of a dense jungle. In the plants I heard loud rustling and saw a few extra large critters crossing the path. And there were literally thousands of tiny bugs getting all over my face even when I turned my light off!
The saving grace is that a small group of night photographers were on the path until late at night, getting good shots of Jiufen and reminding me that I wasn’t in the Amazon rainforest.
Getting to Keelung Mountain is not too hard seeing as it’s so close to the tourist heaven Jiufen; there are multiple buses that go there from Taipei. From Beimen, you can take the 965 bus and get off at Geding, then walk just 1 minute to the trailhead. You can also take the 1062 bus from Zhongxiao Fuxing or Songshan Station and get off at Jiufen Old Street, then walk just a few minutes.
You can also drive and park in one of the multiple nearby paid parking lots.