Explore Kyoto

A free interactive map of Kyoto's temples, gardens and neighbourhoods: 314 places, from Fushimi Inari to coffee houses that opened in the 1930s.

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Kyoto Station The head temple of the Otani branch of Jodo Shinshu, founded here in 1602 on land Tokugawa Ieyasu gave it. Both great halls burned in the fighting of 1864, and the Goei-do and Amida-do you walk into today were finished in 1895.

Kyoto Station A 31-seat ramen shop east of the station that's open from 6:00 until 1:00. The soup is a clear soy broth with raw soy sauce from Fushimi, topped with pork from mature sows, Kyoto's Kujo green onions and mung bean sprouts.

Kyoto Station Kaikado has made tea caddies by hand since 1875, when it started working tinplate imported from England. Each caddy still goes through about 130 steps, the same way as in 1875, and the shop sells them in copper, tinplate and brass.

Kyoto Station The cafe of Kaikado, the tea caddy makers, on the Shichijo-Kawaramachi corner. The coffee is the fifth-generation owner's favourite blend, roasted in-house since 2023, and the teas include Postcard Teas from London and Marukyu Koyamaen from Kyoto. Kaikado's tins and Asahi-yaki cups are in use around the room, and the pieces on display are for sale.

Kyoto Station A confectioner founded in 1421 that still makes offerings for Nishi Hongan-ji. Its matsukaze is a chewy cake of wheat flour, sugar, malt syrup and white miso, left to ferment, scattered with poppy seeds, baked as one big round in a 45.5 cm pan and cut into strips. The family's third generation is said to have created it as food for the 11-year siege of Ishiyama Hongan-ji by Oda Nobunaga.

Kyoto Station An aquarium in Umekoji Park that opened in March 2012. Its river zone recreates the upper to lower reaches of the Yura River, home to Japanese giant salamanders, a special natural monument. The jellyfish room shows about 30 kinds around a 360-degree tank called GURURI, and bottlenose dolphins perform in the stadium.

Kyoto Station Kyoto Brewing Co. was started in Minami-ku in spring 2015 by three friends who'd met in Aomori, and it built its range on Belgian yeast. The taproom next to the brewery pours 200 ml and 400 ml glasses, with seats outside and in an air-conditioned room inside.

Kyoto Station A railway museum next to Umekoji Park that opened on 29 April 2016, with steam locomotives still in working order. The SL Steam ride pulls a coach 1 km out and back behind a real steam engine, and after the last run you can watch the locomotive turn on the turntable in the middle of the roundhouse.

Kyoto Station Ten ramen shops share the 10th floor of the station building, just south of the big staircase, and each has its own seats. The line-up runs from Sapporo miso at Men-ya Kotetsu and Yamagata's Wantanmen no Mangetsu (since 1960) to Toyama Black and Ganso Hakata Daruma's tonkotsu (since 1963), plus Kyoto's own bowls.

Kyoto Station Kyoto's station is a sight in its own right. Hiroshi Hara won the 1991 design competition, and the building opened in 1997. A 171-step staircase climbs 35 m to a rooftop garden 59.8 m up, and the Skyway, a 185 m corridor on the 10th floor, looks north over the city.

Kyoto Station Kyoto Tower, officially Nidec Kyoto Tower, is 131 m tall and sits on top of a nine-storey building across from the station's central exit. Its shape is meant as a lighthouse over a sea of tiled roofs. Mamoru Yamada designed it, and it opened on 28 December 1964. The deck at 100 m looks over the whole city to the mountains on three sides.

Kyoto Station The bottom three floors of the Kyoto Tower building, opened in April 2017. The basement is a food hall that runs to 23:00, with counters for gyoza, dashi rice bowls, Torisei yakitori and conveyor-belt sushi. The ground floor sells Kyoto sweets and souvenirs, and upstairs you can book a wagashi or sushi-making class.

Kyoto Station The head temple of the Hongwanji branch of Jodo Shinshu, and part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto World Heritage listing since 1994. The Goei-do, rebuilt in 1636, measures 62 m by 48 m, and you can walk in and sit on its tatami. Out front, a ginkgo of about 400 years spreads its branches like roots, which is why it's called the upside-down ginkgo.

Kyoto Station Rokusonno Shrine was built in front of the grave of Minamoto no Tsunemoto, a grandson of Emperor Seiwa whose descendants include Minamoto no Yoritomo and the Ashikaga and Tokugawa clans. His son Mitsunaka built the first shrine here in the mid-Heian period, and the present halls went up again under the fifth Tokugawa shogun, Tsunayoshi.

Kyoto Station Ryukoku University's museum stands on Horikawa-dori facing Nishi Hongan-ji and puts on exhibitions on the history of Buddhism, from its start in India to Japan. Don't miss the full-size reconstruction of the corridor of Cave 15 at Bezeklik, near Turfan in Xinjiang, about 15 m long and 3.5 m high, with nine murals of about 3 m each.

Kyoto Station Sumiya is the last surviving ageya, an Edo-period banquet house where hosts fed and entertained guests with taiyu and geiko sent over from the okiya. The Nakagawa family has run it since Shimabara, Kyoto's old licensed hanamachi, moved here in 1641. It was enlarged in 1787 and listed as an Important Cultural Property in 1952.

Kyoto Station Shinpuku Saikan started as a street stall in 1938 and still serves chuka soba in a soy broth so dark it surprises first-timers. It's a few minutes east of Kyoto Station, a few steps from Honke Daiichi Asahi.

Kyoto Station Higashi Hongan-ji's own pond garden, a few blocks east of the temple. It began in 1653 as a retirement villa for the temple's 13th head, the layout is credited to Ishikawa Jozan, and it's been a national Place of Scenic Beauty since 1936. You'll also hear it called Kikoku-tei, after the trifoliate orange hedges planted round it.

Kyoto Station When Heian-kyo became the capital in 794, the only temples allowed in it were To-ji and its twin, Sai-ji, built either side of the main gate, Rashomon. Sai-ji and the gate are long gone, and To-ji is all that still stands of Heian-kyo. In 823 Emperor Saga handed it to Kukai, and his Kodo hall holds a three-dimensional mandala of statues. The pagoda, about 55 m tall, is the fifth on the spot, rebuilt in 1644.

Kyoto Station On the 21st of every month, Kobo-san's day, nearly 1,000 stalls fill To-ji's grounds. It started over 700 years ago as tea stalls for pilgrims at the monthly Mieku service for Kukai. Then came stalls selling dango, firewood, charcoal and pots.

Kyoto Station Umekoji Park is 13.7 hectares of lawns, play areas and woods a 15-minute walk west of Kyoto Station, open since 1995, with the aquarium in its grounds and the railway museum next door. Its Suzaku no Niwa garden was built for the capital's 1,200th anniversary. Its pond is just 1 cm of water over black granite, so the whole pond works as a mirror, and its 6 m waterfall is the biggest in central Kyoto.

Shijo-Karasuma Bukko-ji is the head temple of the Shinshu Bukkoji school of Pure Land Buddhism, moved to this spot in 1586 on Toyotomi Hideyoshi's orders. Its founder's hall, rebuilt in 1884, is a single-storey wooden hall 26.5 metres wide and 33.1 deep, and the Amida Hall next to it dates from 1904. Since 2014 the grounds have also held D&Department Kyoto, a design shop and gallery with a canteen that cooks with local produce.

Shijo-Karasuma Daimaru is the department store on Shijo-dori just west of Takakura-dori, and its food halls fill both basement floors. Le Petitmec, the Kyoto bakery, has a counter on B1. The eighth floor is restaurants, open later than the rest of the store.

Shijo-Karasuma Eirakuya has sold cotton cloth in Kyoto since 1615, and today it's known for tenugui, printed cotton hand towels, in patterns that follow Kyoto's festivals and the 24 seasons of the old calendar. The main shop on Muromachi-dori shares a building with the Hosotsuji Ihee Museum, named after Hosotsuji Ihee, the name 14 generations of heads of the house have carried. The museum shows about 30 tenugui from the Edo period to now.

Shijo-Karasuma Inaba-do, formally Byodo-ji, is a Shingon temple where people pray to its Yakushi, the healing Buddha, for protection from cancer. The temple dates its founding to 1003, and its buildings were rebuilt in 1886. It's also the setting of two kyogen comedies, Inabado and Onigawara.

Shijo-Karasuma Inoda Coffee's main shop is a 211-seat coffee house behind a machiya front on Sakaimachi-dori, with staff in bow ties and gingham-check tables. The coffee comes with milk and sugar already in, the way Inoda has served it from the start. Go early for the Kyoto Breakfast, a plate of ham, scrambled eggs and salad with bread, a small orange juice and a drink.

Shijo-Karasuma Kameya Yoshinaga has been making Kyoto sweets since 1803, and its main shop is on Shijo-dori near Horikawa. Ubatama, a jet-black sweet that looks like a blackberry lily seed, has been made since the shop was founded. The newer slice yokan is red bean jelly cut into thin sheets that you lay on bread and toast.

Shijo-Karasuma Kushikura grills chicken skewers over binchotan charcoal in a Kyoto machiya more than 100 years old, just north of Oike-dori on Takakura-dori. Courses run from ¥3,000 to ¥6,000, and the ¥6,000 Iroori course finishes with tori-soba, noodles in chicken broth. The seasonal dish changes through the year, and this autumn it's hamo and matsutake in a dobin-mushi broth.

Shijo-Karasuma Kyoto Art Center took over the 1931 building of Meirin Elementary School, which opened in 1869 and closed in 1993. Since 2000 it has run galleries and performances, and it lends studios to young artists free of charge. The ground-floor Maeda Coffee cooks inside an artwork, a box-shaped kitchen tower by the artist Teppei Kaneuji and the architect Toshikatsu Ienari.

Shijo-Karasuma The manga museum fills an early Showa school building, the former Tatsuike Elementary School, with about 50,000 manga on 200 metres of open shelves. You can take any of them down and read. Shonen titles are on the first floor, shojo on the second and seinen on the third, and there's a corner of translated manga from around the world.

Shijo-Karasuma Maeda Coffee's main shop opened in 1981 in a former kimono merchant's building near Shijo-Karasuma, and it seats 100. A German Probat roaster works in the shop, so the room smells of beans. The house speciality is spaghetti Napolitan, and the cakes and pies are made in-house.

Shijo-Karasuma Morita Washi is a paper wholesaler that opened in 1927 and has traded from Higashinotoin-dori since 1942. Its shop sells washi from papermakers all over Japan, plus postcards, letter paper and small things made from it, and keeps the prices low. In 1973 the company worked on a national compendium of handmade paper for the Mainichi newspaper.

Shijo-Karasuma The Museum of Kyoto covers the city's history on its second floor and puts on large special exhibitions above. Even if you skip both, walk through the annex, the old Bank of Japan Kyoto branch, a red-brick building finished in 1906 to a design by Tatsuno Kingo and his student Nagano Uheiji. It's an Important Cultural Property and free to enter.

Shijo-Karasuma Rokkaku-do, formally Choho-ji, is a small temple a block off Karasuma-dori, named for its six-sided main hall (the one standing now was rebuilt in 1877). Its priests, the Ikenobo line, shaped ikebana here in the 1400s. Just inside the gate, look for the hexagonal heso-ishi, the 'navel stone', named because Kyoto once thought of this spot as its centre.

Shijo-Karasuma Yoramu is a sake bar with eight or nine seats at one counter, on a quiet stretch of Nijo-dori. Every sake is picked to be interesting rather than bland, from unpasteurised new sake to amber vintages more than 30 years old. It's all poured by the 60 ml glass, so you can try several side by side, with a little food to go with them but nothing like a full meal.

Shijo-Karasuma Sanjo-dori was Kyoto's main east-west street until the trams of 1912 pulled the centre south to Shijo, and plenty of the buildings put up along it since the Meiji era are still standing. Look for the red brick of the 1902 Nakagyo Post Office at the Higashinotoin corner and the 1906 Bank of Japan branch that's now the Museum of Kyoto annex.

Shijo-Karasuma Shinpuhkan wraps around the old Kyoto Central Telephone Office, a 1926 building by Yoshida Tetsuro that in 1983 became the first entry on Kyoto City's list of designated and registered cultural properties. It reopened in June 2020 with about 20 shops, the Uplink Kyoto cinema in the basement and Ace Hotel Kyoto, the chain's first in Japan, whose design Kengo Kuma supervised. A passage cuts through it from Karasuma-dori to Higashinotoin-dori.

Kawaramachi Bar K6 is a second-floor bar in the Vals Building, just east of the corner of Kiyamachi and Nijo, up at the north end of the Takase canal. It opens at 18:00 and pours until 2:00.

Kawaramachi Francois opened in 1934 in a lane by the Takase canal just south of Shijo, a salon-style coffee house its owner Tateno Shoichi meant as a place to talk about art and against the war. Stained-glass windows, a white ceiling, red velvet chairs and a copy of the Mona Lisa set the tone. The north half, remodelled in 1941 to a design by Bencivenni, an Italian studying at Kyoto University, was registered as a Tangible Cultural Property in 2003.

Kawaramachi Takasegawa Nijoen is a Ganko restaurant in an old mansion at Kiyamachi and Nijo, set round a garden that Suminokura Ryoi, the merchant who dug the Takase canal, made in 1611. You eat looking out at plum blossom in early spring and red leaves in autumn, and in the noryo-yuka season it puts out a dining platform beside the Kamo River.

Kawaramachi Honno-ji is a head temple of the Hokke school, known around the world for the Honno-ji Incident of 1582, when Oda Nobunaga died after his general Akechi Mitsuhide turned on him. That temple stood elsewhere, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi later moved Honno-ji to this site on Teramachi. Its Daihoden museum shows what came through five fires, from a tea bowl Nobunaga owned to the three-legged frog incense burner said to have croaked a warning the night before.

Kawaramachi Ippodo's main store has stood on Teramachi-dori, just north of Nijo, since 1864, when it was rebuilt here after the fire of the Hamaguri Gate Incident. The business began in 1717 as Omiya, selling tea and ceramics, and Prince Yamashina gave it the name Ippodo in 1846. Inside there's a big counter under a board listing every tea, a wall of old tea jars and the 44-seat Kaboku Tearoom.

Kawaramachi Kamiji Kakimoto is a paper shop whose roots go back to 1716, when the family ran a bamboo business on Teramachi at Nijo. It turned to paper in 1845 and has followed it from washi to Western paper and paper goods. While a new building goes up on its Teramachi site, the shop trades from a temporary store on Fuyacho-dori just north of Sanjo.

Kawaramachi The Kamo River runs about 27 km through Kyoto, and between the Sanjo and Shijo bridges the low Pontocho houses on the west bank face the water. From 1 May to 15 October restaurants on the west bank between Nijo and Gojo build noryo-yuka dining platforms out on the riverbank, a custom said to go back to the Momoyama period.

Kawaramachi Kaneyo has grilled eel on Rokkaku-dori, just east of Shinkyogoku, since 1912, in a building from the early Taisho years that lost its third floor to a fire before the war. The eel is done the Edo way, split down the back, steamed and then grilled in a sauce topped up since the start. Order the kinshi-don, eel on rice under a Kyoto-style rolled omelette.

Kawaramachi Katsukura is the Kyoto-born tonkatsu chain, and this is its main store on Sanjo-dori just east of Teramachi, set back down a long entrance passage. The cutlets come in a coarse panko of its own, with a house sauce of red wine, apple and dates.

Kawaramachi Kiyamachi-dori follows the Takase canal, which Suminokura Ryoi dug in the 1610s so flat-bottomed boats could carry freight between central Kyoto and Fushimi. The street is named for the timber merchants who set up along it, and willows now line both banks of a canal that stopped carrying boats in 1920. Mori Ogai set his story Takasebune on one of those boats.

Kawaramachi Kyoto Takashimaya is the department store on the Shijo-Kawaramachi crossing, next to Kyoto-Kawaramachi Station, together with its T8 specialty building. The 7th-floor restaurant floor, Dining Garden Kyo-Kairo, has a branch of Mishima-tei, the sukiyaki house that's been on Teramachi since 1873.

Kawaramachi Kyukyodo opened in 1663 as a herbal medicine shop in front of Honno-ji's gate, under a name chosen by the Confucian scholar Muro Kyuso. Medicine and incense share raw materials, so by about 1700 it was making incense, and in the late 1700s it took up brushes and ink for the painters and writers it served. The Teramachi main store sells incense, calligraphy brushes, washi, letter paper, postcards and gift envelopes.

Kawaramachi Mishima-tei has served sukiyaki on the corner of Teramachi and Sanjo since 1873, when its founder came back from learning beef hot pot in Nagasaki. The machiya with its andon lantern keeps most of its Meiji rooms, ceilings and lattices, and the black wagyu is aged the house's own way.

Kawaramachi Murakami Kaishindo has sold Western-style sweets on Teramachi, just north of Nijo, since 1907. The early Showa shop keeps its glass-panelled doors, curved display window, high ceiling and marble columns, and the Kaishindo calligraphy hanging inside is by Kusakabe Meikaku. Its Russian cakes, biscuits in five kinds from apricot and raisin to yuzu jam and chocolate, are sold by the piece or boxed.

Kawaramachi Nishiki Market is a 390 m covered lane of food shops just north of Shijo-dori, and it's been trading for about 400 years. This is where you find Kyoto vegetables, Lake Biwa river fish, hamo eel, yuba and fresh fu. The painter Ito Jakuchu was born into a vegetable wholesaler's family on the lane, and copies of his work turn up on the shop shutters.

Kawaramachi Nishiki Tenmangu stands on Shinkyogoku at the east end of Nishikikoji, the street Nishiki Market runs along, and it's the only shrine in the shopping district. It honours Sugawara no Michizane, the god of learning, and moved here in 1587 when Toyotomi Hideyoshi replanned the city. Nishiki-no-mizu, spring water from more than 30 m underground, flows in the small grounds.

Kawaramachi Pontocho is a narrow lane about 500 m long between the Kamo River and the Takase canal, running from just south of Sanjo-dori to Shijo-dori, and it's one of Kyoto's five geisha districts. It was a sandbank until the river embankment of 1670, tea houses opened around 1712, and its Edo-period houses came through the great fire of 1864. Restaurants and shops now fill many of the old tea house buildings.

Kawaramachi The Pontocho Kaburenjo is the geisha district's own theatre at the Sanjo end of Pontocho, finished in 1927 and praised then as a modern building with an Eastern touch. Look up at the roof for the onigawara tile modelled on the Ranryo-o bugaku mask. Every spring the geiko and maiko stage the Kamogawa Odori here, a dance first performed in 1872.

Kawaramachi Rokuyosha is two separate coffee rooms on Kawaramachi-dori just south of Sanjo. The basement opened in 1950 and the ground floor 15 years later, and the basement's green tiles are said to come from a Kiyomizu-ware tile shop. The basement has roasted its own beans since the early 1980s, serving coffee by day and turning into a bar at 17:00.

Kawaramachi Sanjo Ohashi carries Sanjo-dori over the Kamo River, and in the Edo period it was the western end of the Tokaido road from Edo. Toyotomi Hideyoshi had it rebuilt as a proper bridge in 1590, and some of the giboshi caps on its wooden railings still date from then. Today's bridge, 73 m long, is from 1950.

Kawaramachi Seigan-ji, halfway along Shinkyogoku, is the head temple of the Jodo Seizan Fukakusa school, founded more than 1,300 years ago at Emperor Tenji's wish and moved several times before it settled here. Sei Shonagon and Izumi Shikibu were followers, and it's linked to Sakuden, the priest called the founder of rakugo, so performers come to pray to get better at their art. Outside the gate stands a stone signpost from 1882 where people pinned notes about lost children and lost things.

Kawaramachi Smart Coffee, on Teramachi just north of Sanjo, opened in 1932 as Smart Lunch, and it still roasts its own beans the way it did then. Downstairs is the coffee shop, with hotcakes, French toast and egg sandwiches at ¥800 to ¥850, and upstairs is a lunch room serving Western-style plates.

Kawaramachi Ichinofunairi is the boat basin at the head of the Takase canal, where flat-bottomed takasebune unloaded goods brought up from Fushimi and Osaka. Suminokura Ryoi dug the canal around 1611, and his family lived beside this basin, running the boats and taking a fee from every carrier. At its busiest more than a hundred boats worked the canal, and the basin is now a designated historic site.

Kawaramachi Taku Taku is a live house in a wooden sake storehouse built in May 1917, a few steps south of the Tominokoji and Bukkoji corner. It opened in 1974 as a record cafe, and RC Succession, Dr. John, Albert King and Quruli have all played its small stage.

Kawaramachi Shinkyogoku was cut through old temple grounds in 1872 and runs from Sanjo to Shijo, with Teramachi parallel one street west. It began as a strip of theatres and variety halls, turned to cinemas, and it's still known for the souvenir shops that opened for school groups in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Seven temples and a shrine still stand along it.

Gion Chion-in is the head temple of Jodo Shu, where the founder Honen taught and spent his last years. You walk in through the Sanmon, built in 1621, about 24 metres tall and 50 metres wide under some 70,000 roof tiles, one of the largest wooden gates in Japan. The 70-tonne bell, cast in 1636, rings 108 times on New Year's Eve, swung by a team of 17.

Gion Chourakukan is a Western-style mansion that Murai Kichibei, the "tobacco king", built in 1909 to receive guests, and it was named an Important Cultural Property in 2024. Its cafe serves seasonal desserts in six rooms, each in a different style, with a Bösendorfer piano that a pianist plays on some days.

Gion Furukawacho is a covered shopping street of about 40 shops over 220 metres, running south from Sanjo-dori on the line of the old Wakasa road, the route that brought mackerel from the Sea of Japan. It's known as the Nishiki of the east, and it was once called eastern Kyoto's kitchen. The arcade went up in 1972, and about 1,000 pastel paper lanterns hang from it now.

Gion Gion Corner, in the annex of the Gion Kobu Kaburenjo, puts seven traditional arts on one stage in about 50 minutes: tea, koto, ikebana, bugaku court dance, kyogen comedy, Kyomai dance by Gion Kobu maiko, and bunraku or noh depending on the month. It's where Gion's own teahouse association sends visitors who want to see Kyoto-style dance.

Gion Finlandia Bar opened in 1982 in a Gion building that keeps the look of a teahouse. It pours mostly Nordic spirits and cocktails made the way you ask, and it says it's the only bar given permission to call itself Finlandia.

Gion Izuju has made Kyoto-style sushi at the foot of Yasaka Shrine's stone steps since the end of the Meiji era. The saba-zushi is mackerel caught off Tsushima, pressed on rice and wrapped in kombu, and the inari-zushi rice is mixed with hemp seeds, yuzu and burdock.

Gion The Gion Kagai Art Museum, in the Yasaka Club beside the Kaburenjo, explains the world of Gion Kobu's geiko and maiko through hand-painted Yuzen kimono, Nishijin obi and the kanzashi they change with the seasons. Upstairs, a geiko or maiko dances two Inoue-style pieces several times a day. You can also see the pond garden from 1913 and, when it's open, part of the Kaburenjo's all-hinoki theatre.

Gion North of Shijo-dori, the Shirakawa canal runs through Gion Shinbashi, where neat rows of machiya, stone paving and trees line the water. Kyoto has protected it as a district of traditional buildings since 1976. In spring the cherry trees along the canal are lit up for an evening illumination.

Gion Tsujiri started selling tea in Uji in 1860 and opened this Gion shop on Shijo-dori in 1948. The ground floor is the tea shop, which also sells soft serve, and Saryo Tsujiri on the two floors above has served matcha sweets since 1978. Its most popular order is the Tokusen Tsujiri parfait, layered with matcha and vanilla ice cream, shiratama, matcha jelly and azuki.

Gion Hanamikoji runs south from Shijo-dori through Gion Kobu, the largest of Kyoto's five geiko districts, between teahouses that kept their old fronts. The power lines went underground and the stone paving went down in the 2001 financial year. The street leads to the Gion Kobu Kaburenjo, where the district's geiko and maiko dance the Miyako Odori every April.

Gion Hararyokaku has sold kosen, fragrant powders you sprinkle into hot water, since at least 1685, and its main shop is in Gion. Its best-known product is kuro-shichimi, a seven-spice blend of white and black sesame, chilli, sansho, aonori, poppy seeds and hemp seeds, part of it dry-roasted, then ground and kneaded until the blend turns dark brown.

Gion Ichizawa Shinzaburo Hanpu sells canvas bags made in its own workshop, from totes to rucksacks, at its only shop anywhere, on Higashioji-dori. The family business goes back to the Meiji era, when Kihee Ichizawa bought a sewing machine and started on tool bags and shirts.

Gion Hiranoya Honke, inside Maruyama Park, has made imobo for about 300 years. It's ebi-imo, a taro shaped like a prawn, simmered for a full day and night with dried cod that's soaked for over a week, so the cod's gelatin holds the taro together while the taro softens the fish.

Gion Ishibe-koji is a stone-paved lane south of Yasaka Shrine that winds between stone walls from Kodaiji Kitamon-dori to Shimogawara-dori. It was built as rental housing in the late Meiji and early Taisho years, and it's now part of a protected district of traditional buildings.

Gion Kagizen Yoshifusa has made Kyoto sweets in Gion since the Kyoho era (1716 to 1736). Its tea room is where you try the kuzukiri, made to order from Yoshino kudzu and water and eaten with black sugar syrup, a dessert the shop first delivered to teahouses and Minamiza in the early Showa years. To take home, the Kikujuto, small chrysanthemums of wasanbon sugar, have been made for over 150 years.

Gion Kazurasei has made and sold women's hair goods since 1865, and its main shop is on Shijo-dori in Gion. Look for boxwood combs, kanzashi hairpins and the 100% pure camellia oil it presses in its own factory.

Gion Kennin-ji is Kyoto's oldest Zen temple, founded in 1202 with the monk Eisai as its first abbot. Look up in the Dharma Hall at Koizumi Junsaku's twin dragons, finished in 2002 for the 800th anniversary and painted across a ceiling 11.4 by 15.7 metres. The Wind and Thunder Gods screens you see are high-definition copies, because Sotatsu's original is deposited at the Kyoto National Museum.

Gion Toyotomi Hideyoshi's widow, Kita-no-Mandokoro (Nene), founded Kodai-ji in 1606 to pray for him. Both are enshrined in the Otamaya, whose altar and shrine are decorated with the gold lacquer work known as Kodai-ji maki-e. The paid garden takes in a pond garden credited to Kobori Enshu and a bamboo grove, and Minder, an android Kannon, recites the Heart Sutra in its own hall.

Gion Kyoto Ebisu Shrine is one of Japan's three great Ebisu shrines, founded in 1202 by Eisai as the guardian shrine of Kennin-ji. The lucky bamboo branch, now the emblem of Ebisu worship all over Japan, started as this shrine's own talisman.

Gion Maruyama Park opened in 1886, which makes it Kyoto's oldest park, and it's a designated Place of Scenic Beauty covering 86,000 square metres at the foot of the eastern hills behind Yasaka Shrine. The centrepiece is an old weeping cherry that's lit up at night when it blooms. You'll also find stroll gardens, rest houses and Japanese restaurants inside.

Gion Minamiza has stood at the east end of Shijo bridge for more than 400 years, since the days when kabuki played on the dry bed of the Kamo River. The current building, with its Momoyama-style gables, dates from 1929 and reopened in November 2018 after earthquake-proofing.

Gion Miyagawacho, by the Kamo River, is one of Kyoto's five geiko districts, with 27 teahouses in its association. Its name is said to come from the stretch of river below Shijo bridge where Yasaka Shrine's portable shrines are washed during the Gion Matsuri. The district's geiko and maiko dance the Kyo Odori each April, the 75th in 2026, in a new Kaburenjo that opened in 2025.

Gion Yasaka Shrine watches over the streets of Gion, and its history goes back to at least 876, when the priest Enjo enshrined Gozu Tenno to stop the epidemics sweeping Kyoto. That prayer started the Gion Matsuri, which still fills July, with float processions on 17 and 24 July. The shrine has long ties to the geiko of Gion next door.

Gion Yasui Konpira-gu is where people come to cut bad ties and make good ones. The centrepiece is a stone 1.5 metres tall and 3 metres wide, shaped like an ema plaque and plastered with paper charms, with a hole you crawl through, front to back to end a bad tie and back to front to start a good one.

Higashiyama Asahido has sold Kyo-yaki and Kiyomizu-yaki pottery on Kiyomizu-zaka, by the temple gate, since 1870. Along with pieces from the old kilns it stocks handmade and hand-painted ceramics and crafts from all over Japan, and upstairs there's a gallery and the Saryo Kiraku cafe.

Higashiyama Bunnosuke Chaya was opened in 1909 by the rakugo storyteller Katsura Bunnosuke II as an amazake stop for people walking between Yasaka Shrine and Kiyomizu-dera. Amazake is still on the menu, next to the warabimochi it's known for, with shaved ice in summer and grilled mitarashi dango and zenzai in winter.

Higashiyama Chishaku-in is the head temple of the Chizan branch of Shingon Buddhism, at the east end of Shichijo-dori. Its treasure hall, opened in 2023, always shows the National Treasure panels by Hasegawa Tohaku and his studio, including his Maple and the Cherry Blossoms attributed to his son Kyuzo. The garden is modelled on China's Mount Lu, and its pond runs in under the veranda of the Daishoin hall.

Higashiyama The potter Kawai Kanjiro set up his home and kiln on this Gojozaka plot in 1920, and in 1937 he built the house you walk through now to his own design. It opened as a museum in 1973. The furniture and fittings are his designs or things he collected, and the quiet rooms still give a feel of how he lived.

Higashiyama Kiyomizu-dera was founded in 778 on Mount Otowa, and its main hall, rebuilt in 1633, juts out over the slope on a wooden stage about 13 metres high. Eighteen zelkova pillars hold it up, and the joints don't use a single nail. The grounds have about 1,500 cherry trees and 1,000 maples, and they've been part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto World Heritage site since 1994.

Higashiyama Kiyomizu-zaka is the main slope up to Kiyomizu-dera's Niomon gate, and its shops, many of them long-established, make up the Kiyomizu Monzen-kai. Gojozaka, which climbs to meet it from Yamato-oji-dori, is where potters' houses made Kiyomizu-yaki famous from the 1600s, and Asahido and the Kyoto Ceramics Hall still sell it.

Higashiyama Kyoto Ceramics Hall sits at the bottom of Gojozaka, where the climb to Kiyomizu-dera starts. The ground-floor shop sells Kyo-yaki and Kiyomizu-yaki from well-known potters and kilns to young makers, and on demonstration days you can watch a potter at work. The gallery upstairs puts on shows by potters from Kyoto and beyond.

Higashiyama The Kyoto National Museum opened in 1897 as the Imperial Museum of Kyoto, in the Meiji Kotokan designed by Katayama Tokuma. That building has been closed since 2015 ahead of earthquake-proofing work, so the exhibitions are in the Heisei Chishinkan wing by Taniguchi Yoshio, opened in 2014.

Higashiyama Kyoto Ryozen Gokoku Shrine was founded in 1868 on Emperor Meiji's order to honour the men who died fighting for the Meiji Restoration. On the hill above it, the Ryozen graves honour 1,043 of them, Sakamoto Ryoma and Nakaoka Shintaro among them, with bronze statues of the pair. The road up from Higashioji-dori is called Ishin no Michi, the Restoration Road.

Higashiyama Otani Hombyo is the mausoleum of Shinran, founder of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, moved here, to Higashiyama-Gojo, in 1603. You come in over the Entsukyo, a stone bridge of 1856 with two arches that's nicknamed the spectacles bridge, above a pond of Oga lotus said to be grown from a 2,000-year-old seed.

Higashiyama Rokudo Chinnoji stands at Rokudo no Tsuji, on the old road to the Toribeno burial ground, where Kyoto once sent off its dead. The legend is that the courtier Ono no Takamura used the well behind the main hall to travel to the underworld every night. From 7 to 10 August, for Rokudo Mairi, people come to ring the mukaegane bell and call their ancestors home for Obon.

Higashiyama Rokuharamitsu-ji was founded in 951 by the monk Kuya, and its main hall dates from 1363. Its treasure hall holds Heian and Kamakura sculpture, including Kosho's statue of Kuya with six small Amida Buddhas coming out of his mouth as he chants, and a seated Taira no Kiyomori holding a sutra scroll.

Higashiyama Sanjusangendo, formally Rengeo-in, is a hall 120 metres long, rebuilt in 1266 after the original of 1164 burned down. Inside stand 1,001 statues of the thousand-armed Kannon, a seated one 355 cm tall in the middle and 1,000 standing figures in rows either side. They're all National Treasures, and so are the hall's Wind and Thunder Gods and its 28 guardian deities.

Higashiyama Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka are the stone-stepped, bending lanes that pilgrims have used for centuries to reach Kiyomizu-dera and Yasaka Shrine. The townhouses along them date from the late Edo period to the Taisho era, and with the Yasaka Pagoda and Kodai-ji close by, the whole area is a protected historic district.

Higashiyama Shichijo Kanshundo has made Kyoto sweets on Shichijo-dori since 1865, a minute's walk from the Sanjusangendo bus stop. In its sweets class you shape four namagashi by hand, then whisk your own matcha to drink with one of them and take the other three home.

Higashiyama Shichimiya has been on the corner where Sannenzaka meets Kiyomizu-zaka since 1655. It started as a tea stall called Kawachiya that served karashi-yu to people walking up to the temple, and later turned it into the seven-spice shichimi togarashi it's named after.

Higashiyama Shogunzuka is the mound on the Higashiyama ridge where Emperor Kanmu is said to have buried a clay general in armour to guard his new capital in 794. Beside it, Shoren-in's Seiryuden has a wooden stage of 1,046 square metres, 4.6 times the size of Kiyomizu-dera's, looking over the whole city, and from the west viewpoint you can see as far as the towers of Osaka. The National Treasure Ao Fudo painting is kept in its inner hall, and you pray before a detailed copy.

Higashiyama Toyokuni Shrine enshrines Toyotomi Hideyoshi and was rebuilt in 1880 on the site of Hoko-ji's Great Buddha Hall, which was the largest building in Japan in its day. The National Treasure Karamon gate in front is said to come from Fushimi Castle. Next door hangs Hoko-ji's bell of 1614, whose inscription Tokugawa Ieyasu used as a pretext to turn on the Toyotomi.

Higashiyama Ukiya opened in Pontocho in 1929, and it has served hand-made soba since 1980, when the third-generation owner came home from training at a Tokyo soba shop. The Kiyomizu branch faces Sannenzaka from a Taisho-era storehouse in the Seiryu-en garden, and its menu leans on yuba and tempura.

Higashiyama Yasaka Koshindo, formally Kongo-ji, is a Tendai temple near the Yasaka Pagoda, and it's counted with Shitenno-ji in Osaka and Senso-ji in Tokyo as one of Japan's three great Koshin temples. Its charm is the kukurizaru, a monkey with its hands and feet tied, made to keep your own selfish wants in check.

Higashiyama The Yasaka Pagoda is the five-storey, 46-metre tower of Hokan-ji, a temple said to have been founded in the Asuka period. The shogun Ashikaga Yoshinori rebuilt it in 1440, and inside are five Buddhas of the Five Wisdoms, with a big old foundation stone under their altar. Only the pagoda and two halls, the Yakushi-do and the Taishi-do, are left of the temple.

Higashiyama Yogen-in was built in 1594 by Yodo-dono for her late father, Azai Nagamasa, and rebuilt in 1621 with parts of Fushimi Castle. The corridor ceilings are the castle floorboards where Tokugawa soldiers took their own lives in 1600, still marked with their blood. Tawaraya Sotatsu painted the cedar doors and the sliding screens, his only surviving fusuma.

Okazaki Blue Bottle's first cafe in Kansai opened in March 2018 in a two-storey machiya more than 100 years old, a few minutes' walk from Nanzen-ji. Inside, the old posts, beams and bare clay walls stay, under a tall open ceiling with big windows.

Okazaki Daiyasu has made Kyoto pickles since 1902 and has kept its main shop in Okazaki, east of Heian Shrine, since 1930. Its senmaizuke, Shogoin turnip shaved 2.6 mm thin and cured with Hokkaido kelp, has gone to the Imperial court every year since 1963.

Okazaki Eikan-do, formally Zenrin-ji, has been a temple for more than 1,100 years and still goes by its old nickname, Eikan-do of the maples. Its main image is the Mikaeri Amida, a Buddha who turns his head to look back, and its grounds fill up with visitors for the leaves in late November.

Okazaki Heian Shrine went up in 1895 for the 1,100th anniversary of Kyoto becoming the capital, and its vermilion halls copy the Heian palace's state halls at about five-eighths scale. Behind them is a 33,000 m² stroll garden by the seventh Ogawa Jihei, with weeping cherries in spring and irises in early summer.

Okazaki The Hosomi Museum opened in 1998 to show what three generations of the Hosomi family collected, from Shinto and Buddhist art and tea utensils to Edo painting such as Rimpa and Ito Jakuchu. Exhibitions change through the year.

Okazaki Hyotei started more than 400 years ago as a tea stall by Nanzen-ji's outer gate, and it still serves kaiseki in separate tea-house rooms, one under the original thatched roof. Its signature dish is the Hyotei egg.

Okazaki The Keage Incline is a 582 m inclined railway that carried canal boats up and down a 36 m drop on wheeled carriages, so cargo never had to be unloaded. It was the longest in the world when it was built. The rails are still there, and you can walk the whole slope between rows of cherry trees.

Okazaki Konchi-in is a Nanzen-ji subtemple, moved to this spot in 1605, whose Crane and Turtle Garden by Kobori Enshu is a Special Place of Scenic Beauty, with a crane island and a turtle island facing each other behind a bed of white gravel. Its Toshogu shrine, built in 1628, has a dragon on the worship hall ceiling painted by Kano Tan'yu.

Okazaki Kumano Shrine was founded in 811, when the mountain ascetic Nichien brought the Kumano deity here from Kishu, and it's the oldest of Kyoto's three Kumano shrines. It's also the guardian shrine of Shogo-in.

Okazaki Kyoto's city art museum opened in 1933, and its main building is the oldest public art museum building still standing in Japan. A 2020 renovation tucked a glass-fronted entrance under the front plaza and added Higashiyama Cube, a wing for contemporary shows, while the Collection Room shows Kyoto school painting.

Okazaki Kyoto City Zoo opened in Okazaki Park on 1 April 1903, starting with 238 animals of 61 species. It's a short walk from Heian Shrine and the Okazaki museums, so it fits easily into a day in the area.

Okazaki Kyoto Handicraft Center has sold Japanese crafts to visitors in Shogoin since 1967, from Kyoto damascene and woodblock prints to pottery and kimono.

Okazaki In the basement of the Miyako Messe hall, this museum lays out all 74 of Kyoto's designated traditional crafts, from textiles and dyeing to lacquer and ceramics, with videos and panels on how each is made. Craftspeople demonstrate their work between 10:30 and 17:30, with a different craft on different days.

Okazaki Kyoto Nama Chocolat is a cafe for its own soft ganache chocolates, set in a machiya on a quiet residential street near Heian Shrine. There are two connected tatami rooms and a veranda, 16 seats in all, and no music, just the wind and the leaves.

Okazaki This free city museum tells the story of the Lake Biwa Canal, dug through the hills from 1885 to 1890 to bring boats, water and later hydroelectric power into Kyoto. There's a model of boats riding up the Keage Incline on their carriages, a diorama of Keage and Okazaki, and the drum house where the winches for the incline's cables were worked.

Okazaki Murin-an was the villa of the Meiji statesman Yamagata Aritomo, built from 1894 to 1896, and the seventh Ogawa Jihei laid out its garden with Lake Biwa Canal water running through it like a country stream and the Higashiyama hills as its backdrop. Yamagata wanted lawn, not moss, though more than 50 kinds of moss have since taken over. Upstairs in the Western-style house is the room where he and Ito Hirobumi talked foreign policy before the Russo-Japanese War.

Okazaki Nanzen-ji is the head temple of the Nanzen-ji school of Rinzai Zen. Its 22 m Sanmon gate, rebuilt in 1628, has a balcony you can climb, and the Hojo is a National Treasure whose dry garden, credited to Kobori Enshu, is nicknamed the tiger cubs crossing. Out in the grounds, a red-brick aqueduct carries the Lake Biwa Canal, finished in 1890, past the temple.

Okazaki Junsei serves yudofu, Kyoto's simmered tofu, in the garden grounds of a school of medicine opened by the Edo-period physician Shingu Ryotei. The old Junsei Shoin building is a registered tangible cultural property, and the tofu is made from Japanese soybeans and served with the house dipping sauce.

Okazaki MoMAK is the national museum of 20th-century art and crafts, with a lean toward Kyoto and Kansai artists such as the Kyoto school of Japanese-style painting. Fumihiko Maki designed its granite-gridded building, which opened in 1986, and the collection holds 425 works by the potter Kawai Kanjiro.

Okazaki The Okazaki stretch of the Lake Biwa Canal runs through Okazaki Park and under the giant Heian Shrine torii, with cherry trees along its banks. In cherry season, Jikkokubune boats run 25-minute, roughly 3 km round trips from the Nanzen-ji boat basin, with a guide explaining the canal's history.

Okazaki Okazaki Shrine was founded in 794 as one of the shrines guarding the four sides of the new capital, the eastern one, which is why it's also called Higashi Tenno. Wild rabbits once lived all over this area, so rabbits are its messengers, and you'll find rabbit guardian statues and a black granite rabbit at the water basin.

Okazaki ROHM Theatre Kyoto is the old Kyoto Kaikan, a modernist hall by Kunio Maekawa that opened in 1960, rebuilt and reopened under its new name in 2016. It holds a 2,000-seat main hall, a 700-seat South Hall and a black-box North Hall, round a courtyard called ROHM Square.

Okazaki Rokusei has cooked Kyoto cuisine since 1899 and started its teoke bento in 1966, seasonal dishes packed into a wooden pail lacquered on the inside. In 1977 it moved to its spot on the north bank of the canal, just west of Heian Shrine.

Okazaki Shogo-in is the head temple of the Honzan Shugen school, which once oversaw yamabushi mountain ascetics across Japan, founded in 1090 and rebuilt on this site in 1676. After the Great Tenmei Fire of 1788 burned the Imperial Palace, it served as Emperor Kokaku's temporary palace for about three years, and its halls are lined with Kano school paintings.

Okazaki Shoren-in is a Tendai temple whose head priests, until the Meiji era, were nearly all imperial princes or sons of the top regent families, and it feels more like a palace than a monastery. You walk through the tatami halls first, then out into a pond garden credited to Soami that borrows the hill behind it, and the Kirishima garden credited to Kobori Enshu.

Okazaki Tenju-an is a Nanzen-ji subtemple founded in 1339 as the memorial hall of Nanzen-ji's founding priest and rebuilt in 1602 by Hosokawa Yusai. It has two gardens, one round a pond and one of dry stone and gravel.

Okazaki Yamamoto Menzou is a small udon shop near Heian Shrine, with a ten-seat counter and two tables. The red Menzou Special is a spicy bowl with burdock tempura, fried mochi and egg (you choose the heat), and the beef and burdock tsukemen comes with a hot dipping broth.

Ginkakuji The hill above Ginkaku-ji is Nyoigatake, better known as Daimonji-yama, where a giant 大 is lit on the night of 16 August for the Gozan Okuribi. Ginkaku-ji's own history says Ashikaga Yoshimasa had the first one laid out in 1489 to send off the spirit of his son Yoshihisa. A path climbs through the Ginkakuji-yama national forest to the fire beds, and from the crossing of the 大 you look out over the whole city, with the green of the Imperial Palace in the middle.

Ginkakuji Ashikaga Yoshimasa, the eighth Muromachi shogun, began building a mountain villa here in 1482, and after his death in 1490 it became the Zen temple Jisho-ji. Two buildings survive from his day, the Kannon-den, which is the Silver Pavilion itself, and the Togu-do hall, and both are National Treasures. In front of the main hall, a stepped bed of white sand patterned like ripples (the Ginshadan) sits beside a flat-topped sand cone, the Kogetsudai.

Ginkakuji The house, studios and garden of Hashimoto Kansetsu (1883 to 1945), a Nihonga painter who built the place over about 32 years from 1913 and moved in in 1916. The pond garden he designed covers 7,400 square metres of the 10,000 square metre estate, is a national Place of Scenic Beauty and is set with stone carvings from the Heian to Kamakura periods. A museum on the grounds shows his paintings.

Ginkakuji Honen-in is a short climb east of the Philosopher's Path, on the spot where Honen, founder of the Jodo sect, kept a hermitage with his disciples Anraku and Juren. The present temple dates from 1680. You walk in through a thatched gate between two mounds of white sand, the byakusadan, and the patterns drawn in them change with the seasons.

Ginkakuji Keibunsha calls itself a shop of all sorts of things to do with books. Beside the bookshop there's the Seikatsukan, with books on clothes, food and the home and the household goods that go with them, the Gallery Annfair, which hosts shows and a yearly used-book fair, and Cottage, an event space with a kitchen at the back of the bookshop.

Ginkakuji Known as Kurodani, this is where Honen built his first hermitage in 1175 after coming down from Mount Hiei, and it's now a head temple of the Jodo sect. In 1862 Matsudaira Katamori, lord of Aizu, made it his Kyoto headquarters with 1,000 men, and the men who became the Shinsengumi had their audience with him here. The Aizu cemetery up the hill remembers 237 who died in Kyoto from 1862 to 1867 and 115 killed at Toba-Fushimi.

Ginkakuji Kyoto University's museum holds about 2.6 million specimens and objects, and its permanent galleries cover natural history, cultural history and the history of technology. On some Saturdays graduate students run the Children's Museum, explaining the exhibits in conversation with visitors, and adults are welcome too.

Ginkakuji Yoji and Tomi Shinagawa opened Omen in front of Ginkaku-ji on 10 August 1967. The dish comes from Isesaki in Gunma, where Tomi learned it from her mother-in-law during the war. You dip the udon in a broth of Hokkaido kombu and bonito, adding as much as you like from a heap of condiments such as kinpira burdock, sesame, green onion, ginger and seasonal vegetables.

Ginkakuji A stone path that follows a branch of the Lake Biwa Canal for about 1.8 km, from near Nyakuoji Bridge in the south to Ginkaku-ji in the north. It's named after Kitaro Nishida, the Kyoto University philosopher who's said to have walked here deep in thought. In 1922 the painter Hashimoto Kansetsu gave 360 cherry trees for the banks, which is why they're known as Kansetsu's cherry trees.

Ginkakuji A convent temple founded in 1654 for Princess Tari-no-miya, daughter of Emperor Go-Mizunoo, and headed by imperial princesses for generations. Go-Mizunoo loved camellias, and the garden holds more than 100 kinds, including the Nikko camellia, a Kyoto City natural monument. The shoin, moved here from Emperor Gosai's palace, keeps paintings of birds and flowers of the four seasons attributed to the Kano school.

Ginkakuji A Tendai temple founded in 984, when the priest Kaisan brought an Amida statue down from Mount Hiei. The main hall was rebuilt in 1717 and the three-storey pagoda, about 30 m tall, in 1817. The Nehan garden, laid out in 1988, shows the dying Buddha ringed by his disciples and animals in stones, with white sand for the Ganges and the Higashiyama hills, Mount Hiei and Daimonji behind it.

Ginkakuji The retreat where the poet Ishikawa Jozan (1583 to 1672) spent his last years, now a temple under Eihei-ji of the Soto Zen sect. At its heart are portraits of 36 Chinese poets by Kano Tanyu, each with a poem above it in Jozan's hand. Out in the garden you'll hear the knock of a bamboo shishi-odoshi, a device Jozan is credited with inventing.

Ginkakuji The head shop of Tenka Ippin, the ramen chain built on kotteri, a soup of chicken bones and vegetables so thick the company calls it a soup you eat rather than drink. Founder Tsutomu Kimura started with a street cart in 1971 and spent 3 years and 9 months getting that soup right. The cart became this shop, the chain's first, in August 1975.

Ginkakuji Founded in 859 to protect the capital, Yoshida Shrine sits on the hill of Kagura-oka, up the street from Kyoto University's main gate. The Daigen-gu hall, an Important Cultural Property, enshrines the gods of every shrine in Japan, and there are small shrines to the god of cooking and the god of sweets. It's busiest at Setsubun, 2 to 4 February, when about 500,000 people come and around 800 stalls line the approaches.

Arashiyama Adashino was a burial ground from the Heian period on, and in the middle of the Meiji era local people gathered up the stone markers scattered across its hills. About 8,000 of them now stand in rows in the temple's Sai no Kawara enclosure, facing a seated Amida and a 13-tier pagoda. At the back of the grounds, steps climb through a grove of moso bamboo.

Arashiyama This bamboo path is one of the sights Kyoto is best known for. It runs about 400 m from Nonomiya Shrine past Tenryu-ji's north gate to Okochi Sanso, with tended bamboo on both sides, and on a cloudy day it's dim even at noon.

Arashiyama Yoshimura makes its own soba in the former home of the painter Kawamura Manshu, two doors west of the north end of Togetsukyo, with the bridge and the Oi River right in front. Every bowl comes with a small Kyoto obanzai side, plain soba starts at ¥1,440, and the Arashiyama set of zaru soba, buckwheat salad and rice is ¥1,980.

Arashiyama Hiranoya has stood at the foot of Atago Shrine's first torii for about 400 years, dealing in sweetfish from the Hozu River and serving tea to pilgrims on their way up the mountain. Stop for shinko, twisted rice-flour dumplings in three colours shaped like the winding path to the summit, steamed over a wood-fired kamado and dusted with kinako and brown sugar.

Arashiyama About 1 km upstream from Togetsukyo, some 200 stone steps climb from the river to this small temple. The merchant Suminokura Ryoi, who opened the Hozu River to boats, moved it here in 1606 for the workers who died on his river works, and a statue of him sits inside. The Daihikaku hall is built out over the rock face, with a view down the gorge and across the city.

Arashiyama Emperor Saga built a detached palace here in the early 800s, and it became a temple in 876, headed by emperors and imperial princes until the start of the Meiji era. Beside the halls lies Osawa Pond, which the temple calls the oldest surviving garden pond in Japan. It's also the home of the Saga Goryu school of ikebana, which traces itself to Emperor Saga arranging wild chrysanthemums picked on the pond's island.

Arashiyama This museum by Togetsukyo shows Japanese painting, mostly from the Edo period to the modern era, in seasonal exhibitions. Its café looks straight out at the bridge and the Oi River, and only museum visitors can use it.

Arashiyama Gio-ji is a small thatched nunnery hidden in bamboo and maples, with a story straight out of The Tale of the Heike. Gio, a dancer favoured by Taira no Kiyomori, was pushed out when he tired of her and became a nun here with her mother and sister. In the hut, a big round window glows with the colours of the garden outside, and the temple calls it the rainbow window.

Arashiyama Hogon-in is a subtemple of Tenryu-ji that only opens in spring and autumn. Its Shishiku garden, laid out by the Zen monk Sakugen Shuryo, borrows Arashiyama as a backdrop and centres on a huge lion rock under a canopy of maples. The temple was founded in 1461 and moved to this site in 2002.

Arashiyama Horin-ji sits halfway up Arashiyama on the far side of the river, and the monk Gyoki founded it in 713. From the stage-like terrace beside the main hall you look out over Togetsukyo, Sagano, the Higashiyama hills and the city. On the way up, the little Denden-gu shrine guards electricity and radio waves.

Arashiyama About 120 wild Japanese macaques live on Mount Iwata, just across the river from central Arashiyama. A 20-minute climb, starting with 120 steps, takes you up to the rest hut at 160 m, where the monkeys hang around and the whole city spreads out below. On a clear day you can pick out Kyoto Tower.

Arashiyama Jojakko-ji climbs the lower slope of Mount Ogura in flights of stone steps under the maples. The priest Nisshin founded it in 1596, and its main hall was the guest hall of Fushimi Momoyama Castle, moved here with help from Kobayakawa Hideaki. The thatched Niomon gate, built in the 1340s and brought here in 1616, is the oldest building on the grounds, and its guardian statues are attributed to Unkei.

Arashiyama Kameyama is the hillside section of Arashiyama Park, upstream from Togetsukyo on the north bank, a slope of red pines, cherries and maples with wild azaleas underneath. Paths wind up through it to rest spots and a viewing deck.

Arashiyama About 600 pillars wrapped in fabric dyed in the Kyo-yuzen kimono style stand in rows around Randen's Arashiyama terminus. The railway put them up in 2013 as part of a push to keep visitors in Arashiyama into the evening.

Arashiyama Kurumazaki honours Kiyohara no Yorinari, a late Heian scholar buried here in 1189, and takes its name from the day Emperor Go-Saga's ox cart broke its shaft in front of it. Inside the grounds, the Geino Shrine for performers is ringed by more than 4,000 red fence boards painted with stage names, pen names and the names of theatre troupes.

Arashiyama Hata no Imiki Tori built the first hall of Matsuo Taisha at the foot of Mount Matsuo in 701, before Kyoto became the capital, and since the late Muromachi period it's been revered as the leading god of sake brewing in Japan. Its three Shofuen gardens, finished in 1975 by Shigemori Mirei, are laid with some 200 blue stones from the Yoshino River in Shikoku.

Arashiyama Nison-in is named for its two main images, a Shaka who sends souls off and an Amida who welcomes them, a gilded pair carved in the mid-Kamakura period. Past the gate, the Momiji no Baba approach runs about 100 m between alternating maples and cherries. The temple dates to the 830s or 840s and sits at the foot of Mount Ogura.

Arashiyama Nonomiya is a small shrine on the bamboo path, on the site where imperial princesses once stayed before going to serve at the Grand Shrine of Ise, and it turns up in The Tale of Genji. Its black torii is sawtooth oak with the bark left on, the oldest style of torii in Japan, set in a low brushwood fence.

Arashiyama Okochi Denjiro, a period-film star of the early Showa years, fell for the view from Mount Ogura and spent 30 years building this hillside garden at the far end of the bamboo path. Its paths wind through cherries and maples to views of the Hozu River, Mount Hiei and the city. Four of its structures, the Daijokaku house among them, are registered cultural properties.

Arashiyama About 1,200 stone rakan crowd the hillside at Otagi Nenbutsu-ji, at the top end of the Saga-Toriimoto road, each with its own expression. Ordinary visitors carved them in the 1980s, learning under the sculptor-priest Kocho Nishimura while he rebuilt the temple. The hall and gate themselves were moved here in 1922.

Arashiyama Rakushisha is the thatched hut of Mukai Kyorai (1651 to 1704), the disciple Matsuo Basho trusted most. Basho stayed here three times, and in early summer 1691 he used it as his base for touring Saga and Arashiyama and wrote his Saga Diary here.

Arashiyama Morika has been making tofu in Saga since around the Ansei era of the 1850s. It's a takeaway counter, not a restaurant, so come for the plain Saga tofu, the hirosu fritters, or karashi tofu with very hot mustard hidden in the middle.

Arashiyama Saga-Toriimoto grew up as both the gateway town for pilgrims heading to Atago Shrine and a farming village, and the road still shows both. Townhouses with mushiko windows stand next to thatched farmhouses as it climbs from Adashino Nenbutsu-ji to Atago's first torii.

Arashiyama This slow, old-style train covers about 7 km of the Hozu River gorge in 25 minutes, from Torokko Saga next to JR Saga-Arashiyama Station to Torokko Kameoka. It runs on track left over when the JR line was double-tracked, and it's been carrying sightseers since 1991. Car 5, the Rich, has no window glass, so you get the wind and the river noise.

Arashiyama It also goes by Saga Shakado, after its main image, a sandalwood Shaka that the monk Chonen brought back from Song China in 987. The statue is a National Treasure, and model internal organs, prayers and sutras were later found sealed inside it. Its two-storey Niomon gate, rebuilt in the 1780s, stands right in the middle of Sagano.

Arashiyama Shigetsu is Tenryu-ji's own restaurant, serving shojin ryori, the Zen vegetarian cooking made with no animal products at all, in a hall just south of the Sogen Pond. The Michelin Guide Kyoto Osaka 2026 gave it a Bib Gourmand and a Green Star.

Arashiyama The shogun Ashikaga Takauji founded Tenryu-ji in 1339 in memory of Emperor Go-Daigo, and it still ranks first among Kyoto's five great Zen temples. You come for the Sogen Pond garden, laid out by Muso Soseki nearly 700 years ago and still close to how he left it, with the Arashiyama hills borrowed as its backdrop. It's one of the UNESCO-listed monuments of ancient Kyoto.

Arashiyama The 155 m bridge over the Oi River, with wooded hills rising right behind it, is the picture most people carry of Arashiyama. A monk named Dosho first bridged the river near here in the 830s or 840s, and the bridge you walk across today was finished in 1934. Its name, the moon-crossing bridge, comes from the retired Emperor Kameyama, who watched the moon move over it.

Nijo Jittoku has put on live music since 1973 in a converted sake storehouse on Omiya-dori, north of Nijo Castle, with room for 80 to 100 people. It's mostly rock and jazz, plus an open-mic acoustic night, mostly on Mondays, and rakugo at noon on the first Sunday of the month.

Nijo Coffee Kobo Teramachi roasts its own beans in a hot-air roaster, in a two-storey row house about 110 years old on the Sanjo-kai arcade. Coffee is brewed one cup at a time and served in Kyoto-ware cups, and about 20 kinds of freshly roasted beans are on sale.

Nijo Seike makes its own yuba from Japanese soybeans in Miyama, and this nine-seat counter on Oike-dori near Nijo Castle, its first shop in Kyoto city when it opened in 1999, serves it as yuba kaiseki courses at lunch and dinner. The Horikawa course is vegetarian, with no meat, fish or bonito stock, egg or dairy.

Nijo The Kyoto Shibori Museum opened in 2001 and calls itself the only museum in Japan devoted to shibori tie-dye. Its director, Kenji Yoshioka, is the second generation of Yoshioka Jin Shoten, a shibori maker founded in 1939 across the lane. The special exhibitions of large shibori pieces change several times a year, with the tools of the craft on display alongside.

Nijo Menbaka has served ramen on Marutamachi-dori since 1984, and a year after opening it hit on its trick, pouring flaming oil over the green onions on a bowl of shoyu ramen right at the counter. The broth is a light soy sauce one with Kyoto's Kujo onions, and there are vegan, gluten-free (rice noodles) and pork-free versions.

Nijo Mibu-dera is a Ritsu sect temple founded in 991, visited for centuries to ward off bad luck, and in the 1860s the Shinsengumi trained in martial arts and with cannon in its grounds. On an island in the pond, the Mibu-zuka holds the graves of 11 Shinsengumi members, with busts of Kondo Isami and Hijikata Toshizo. A cone of 1,000 stone Buddhas, gathered from around the city in the Meiji era, is built to look like a Myanmar pagoda.

Nijo Mikane Shrine is a small neighbourhood shrine to Kanayamahiko, god of metals and minerals, and people come from all over Japan and abroad to pray about money. Its torii is painted gold with a finish from Hori Kinpaku, a Kyoto gold-leaf maker founded in 1711, and its sacred ginkgo is over 200 years old and about 22 m tall.

Nijo Nagi Shrine, also called Moto-Gion, marks where the god Susanoo was first enshrined in 869, in a wood of tens of thousands of nagi trees, during a plague. When the deity moved on to Yasaka, locals saw it off with decorated parasols and music, said to be the origin of the Gion Festival's kasahoko parasol floats. Two main halls stand side by side, its own and the Hayabusa Shrine's.

Nijo Tokugawa Ieyasu built Nijo Castle in 1603 to guard the Imperial Palace and to lodge the shogun on his visits to Kyoto. Its Ninomaru Palace, six buildings lined with Kano school paintings, is the only palace complex still standing inside a Japanese castle. In 1867 the 15th shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, announced the return of power to the emperor in its great hall.

Nijo Nijo Jinya is a merchant's house just south of Nijo Castle, rebuilt between 1848 and 1854, where a rice dealer and money changer put up feudal lords and people waiting on the shogunate's courts nearby. It was built with an ambush in mind, so there's a lookout room hidden above the main hall, a staircase disguised as a tea-jar shelf and a door that locks from behind.

Nijo Nijo Wakasaya has made Kyoto sweets on the corner of Nijo-dori and Ogawa-dori since 1917, four generations so far. The founder's first hit was Furosen, kuzu-yu in tiny picture boxes that turns thick when you pour on hot water, and the standbys now are yakiguri, a whole chestnut wrapped in chestnut paste and baked, and fukuguri, finished with a coat of yokan.

Nijo Sanjo-kai is a covered shopping street running about 800 m along Sanjo-dori from Horikawa to Senbon, one of the longest arcades in western Japan. It started in 1914 with 72 shops and still has a butcher, greengrocers, bakeries and a rice-ball shop next to cafes and shops in done-up machiya. The Matabi-sha, a small Yasaka Shrine site tied to the start of the Gion Festival, stands inside it.

Nijo Shinsen-en is what's left of the imperial garden laid out in 794 beside the Heian palace, a spring-fed pond with a shrine to the dragon king Zennyo Ryuo, now a Toji Shingon temple just south of Nijo Castle. Kukai is said to have prayed for rain on its shore in 824, and the rite held here in 869 to ward off disaster, with 66 halberds, one for each province, grew into the Gion Festival. When Tokugawa Ieyasu built the castle he took the spring to fill his moats, and the garden lost its northern grounds.

Nijo Takenobu Inari is a shrine founded in 859, a few steps south of the Sanjo-kai arcade, where people pray for business and for winning. Sakamoto Ryoma and his wife Oryo are tied to its sacred enoki tree, said to be 850 years old, which fell in May 2025, and the shrine is also linked to the folk tale of Issun-boshi.

Nijo The Yagi family's house in Mibu is where the Shinsengumi made their first headquarters in 1863, and that September Serizawa Kamo was cut down in its back room on a night of pouring rain, with some of the sword cuts still there. The gatehouse dates from 1804 and the main house from 1809, and the family, here for 15 generations, now runs the Kyoto Tsuruya sweet shop.

Nijo Yamanaka Aburaten has sold oil on Shimodachiuri-dori since the Bunsei era (1818 to 1830), and it's one of the few oil specialists left in Japan. The shop building is a registered tangible cultural property, and the shelves hold cooking oils from Japan and abroad next to natural oils for wood and for skin.

Imperial Palace Metro is a basement club you reach from Exit 2 of Jingu-Marutamachi Station, and it has the longest history of any club still open in Kyoto. It holds about 300 people, yet Daft Punk, Aphex Twin, Jeff Mills and Thundercat have all played here, and the Diamond Night party has run for about 30 years. It books club nights and live shows across most genres.

Imperial Palace This coffee stand opened in 2022 in a former tea room inside Nashinoki Shrine, and every drink and ice cube is made with the shrine's Somei well water. The beans are specialty coffee roasted at the company's Kanondo shop near Shijo-Karasuma, and you drink on the veranda or in the garden.

Imperial Palace Doshisha grew from the English school Niijima Jo opened in 1875, and its campus across Imadegawa-dori from the palace keeps a row of Meiji-era Western-style buildings, five of them Important Cultural Properties, including the 1886 chapel and the 1890 Harris Science Hall. The Harris hall is now a free gallery on Niijima and the school's history.

Imperial Palace Goo Shrine stands on Karasuma-dori, west of the palace, and honours Wake no Kiyomaro, who urged Emperor Kanmu to move the capital to Heian-kyo, and his sister Hiromushi, who raised war orphans. A legend says 300 wild boars guarded Kiyomaro on his way to Usa, so boars stand where you'd expect guardian dogs. The shrine moved here from Jingo-ji in 1886.

Imperial Palace Hachikian has been a chicken restaurant on Kawabata-dori since 1970. Lunch brings oyakodon made with Kyo-aka jidori for ¥2,750 or kamo nanban with duck and Kujo leeks, and the house dish is mizutaki, big pieces of chicken in a broth simmered for hours, with house ponzu, finished as rice porridge.

Imperial Palace Hatakaku has served botan nabe, wild boar hotpot, since 1918. The man who first served it grew up at an inn by the palace hunting grounds and built the dish from a country boar stew. Here the boar simmers in white miso rather than the usual red, and every room is private, looking onto a garden.

Imperial Palace Honda Miso has made miso since 1830, when its founder, a Tanba brewer known for his koji, began supplying the palace kitchens. Its sweet white miso is the one the family named Saikyo miso, miso of the western capital. Pick up a few Ichiwan misoshiru, miso and fillings sealed in a wafer shell that turn into soup when you add hot water.

Imperial Palace Shokoku-ji opened this museum in 1984 for the treasures of its own temples, Kinkaku-ji and Ginkaku-ji, five National Treasures and 145 Important Cultural Properties among them. The permanent rooms show part of Ito Jakuchu's ink screen paintings from Kinkaku-ji and a reconstruction of the Sekka-tei tea house.

Imperial Palace Kamigoryo Shrine traces its start to 794, when rites were held for the spirit of Emperor Sudo, and seven more spirits were added later. The wood in its grounds, the Goryo no Mori, is where the Onin War broke out.

Imperial Palace This was the residence of the Kan'in, one of the four princely houses of the Edo period, founded in 1710, and the present building went up in 1883 as an Imperial Household office. Its free exhibition, renewed in 2022, covers the Gyoen's history, its court nobles and its nature, and a VR theatre shows the old nobles' town on a 10K screen.

Imperial Palace Tawaraya Yoshitomi, a Kyoto confectioner since 1755, opened this small museum in 1978 to tell the story of Kyoto sweets. The pieces to see are the togei-gashi, flowers and birds modelled in sugar, along with old documents, paintings, models of sweets and the tools used to make them.

Imperial Palace Kyoto Gyoen is the park around the Imperial Palace, 1.3 km long and 700 m wide. More than 140 princely and noble houses stood here in the Edo period, and what's left is lawns, woods more than a century old and the remains of a few old gardens, among about 100,000 trees. It never closes and it's free.

Imperial Palace Emperors lived here for about 500 years, from the 14th century until the Meiji era, and most of the buildings you see went up in 1855. You can't go inside any of them, but the walking route takes you past the Shishinden throne hall, the Kogosho and the gardens, and entry is free with no booking.

Imperial Palace Finished in 1904, this brick Renaissance-style building was the prefecture's headquarters until 1971 and still has working offices, which makes it the oldest government building in Japan in use in its original form. You can walk into the main hall, the old governor's office, the old dining room and the old assembly chamber, and it's free.

Imperial Palace The government opened this guest house inside Kyoto Gyoen in 2005 to receive state and official guests from abroad. It was built with sukiya carpentry, plasterwork, kirikane gold leaf, Nishijin weaving and maki-e lacquer, and the tour takes you through the Juraku-no-Ma, the Yubae-no-Ma, the Fuji-no-Ma banquet hall and the Kiri-no-Ma.

Imperial Palace Nashinoki Shrine was founded in 1885 for Sanjo Sanetsumu and his son Sanetomi, both statesmen of the Meiji Restoration. Its Somei well is one of Kyoto's three famous waters, and people still come to fill bottles. In late September the shrine's bush clover flowers for the Hagi Matsuri, with archery, iai sword drawing, dance and traditional music.

Imperial Palace Rozan-ji stands on the site of the house where Murasaki Shikibu grew up, married, raised her daughter and wrote The Tale of Genji. Its Genji garden is white sand and curving moss, and from late June to early September 1,500 to 2,000 purple bellflowers bloom in it. The temple traces its founding to 938.

Imperial Palace This second palace was built in the early 1600s for the retired Emperor Go-Mizunoo, and a fire in 1854 took most of its buildings. What's left is the big stroll garden, its tea houses and a pebble shore laid with about 110,000 flat stones, each roughly 10 cm across.

Imperial Palace Shimogoryo Shrine guarded the Imperial Palace and honours eight spirits of Heian nobles who died under false charges, enshrined to calm them and keep plague away. It moved to this spot in 1590. The main hall was once the sanctuary of a temporary palace, and the front gate came from that palace's Kenreimon.

Imperial Palace Shokoku-ji heads its own branch of Rinzai Zen, which also takes in Kinkaku-ji and Ginkaku-ji, and the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu had it built, finished in 1392. Its Dharma Hall, rebuilt in 1605, is the oldest lecture hall of its kind in Japan. On the ceiling is Kano Mitsunobu's dragon, about 9 m across, known as the crying dragon.

Imperial Palace Shusuitei is the only building left of the Kujo family, one of the five regent houses, put up about 200 years ago as a pavilion for tea gatherings. It keeps two tea rooms of ten and three mats, and from upstairs you look over the Kujo pond and the Takakura bridge. On the pond beside it, Itsukushima Shrine has a stone torii with a curved gable top, one of Kyoto's three unusual torii.

Imperial Palace Toraya, the wagashi maker founded in Kyoto in the late Muromachi period, has kept a shop here since before 1628, back when it supplied the palace. Its tea room, a short way west along Ichijo-dori, looks onto a garden with a small Inari shrine and an Edo-period storehouse, and you can read any of its 600 books on wagashi and Japanese culture.

Imperial Palace Yamadamatsu has been an incense wood specialist since the Edo period, and its main shop is on Muromachi-dori, west of the palace. Besides fragrant woods you'll find incense shaped like Kyoto's seasonal flowers, cream incense and an electric burner for warming incense wood.

Demachiyanagi Demachi Masugata is the covered arcade on Masugata-dori between Kawaramachi and Teramachi, across the river from Demachiyanagi. It's mostly fresh food, the street the neighbourhood does its daily shopping on, and Demachiza's cinema and bookshop is inside it. On 18 May the three huge mikoshi of the Goryo Matsuri are carried right through the arcade.

Demachiyanagi Demachiza is a small cinema in the Demachi Masugata arcade, with two screens of 42 and 48 seats in the basement and on the second floor. The ground floor holds a cafe, Demachiza no Soko, and CAVA BOOKS, a bookshop.

Demachiyanagi The Mitsui merchant family built this villa in 1925 as a rest house for visits to its ancestral shrine, which had been moved to this site in 1909. The main house is older. It went up on Kiyamachi in 1880 and was moved here, with a third-floor lookout for views of the Higashiyama hills. You can walk through the house and a moss garden with a gourd-shaped pond fed by the Izumi river.

Demachiyanagi Chion-ji is one of the head temples of the Jodo sect, and its nickname goes back to 1331, when Emperor Go-Daigo had its priest chant the nembutsu a million times (hyakumanben) to end an epidemic after an earthquake. On the 15th of every month the grounds fill with the Hyakumanben Tezukuri-ichi, a handmade market, from 8:00 to 16:00, rain or shine.

Demachiyanagi Just east of Kamigamo Shrine, the houses of its priestly families line the Myojin river, which flows out of the shrine grounds. It's been a priests' quarter since the Muromachi period, and you can pick out the houses by their earthen walls, gates and earth bridges over the water, and by a distinctive gable ornament called inokosasu.

Demachiyanagi Kamigamo Shrine is one of Kyoto's oldest, on 76 hectares south of Mt Koyama, where its god is said to have come down to earth. In front of the Hosodono hall stand two cones of white sand, the tatesuna, that stand for the mountain, with pine needles stuck in the top of each. The two main halls are National Treasures and 41 other buildings are Important Cultural Properties.

Demachiyanagi The Kamo and Takano rivers meet at Demachiyanagi in a triangle of riverbank known as the Kamogawa Delta. Its stepping stones, some shaped like turtles and birds, are what it's famous for, and at weekends it fills with families and students from Kyoto and Doshisha universities. It turns up in plenty of TV dramas and anime, so some people come just for that.

Demachiyanagi Kawai Shrine is a branch of Shimogamo at the south end of Tadasu no Mori, and people come to its goddess, Tamayori-hime, to pray for beauty. You buy a wooden plaque shaped like a hand mirror, make up the face drawn on it with your own cosmetics, and write your wish on the back. Kamo no Chomei, who wrote Hojoki, grew up here as the son of one of its priests.

Demachiyanagi Opened in 1924, this is Japan's oldest public botanical garden, 24 hectares with about 10,000 kinds of plants, 7,000 of them garden varieties. The glass conservatory, one of the largest in the country, holds about 4,500. About 500 cherry trees flower in spring, and in autumn the maples, sweetgums and ginkgos turn.

Demachiyanagi Malebranche opened on Kitayama-dori in 1982, across from the Botanical Gardens' Kitayama gate, and this is still the main shop. Its Mont Blanc has been the speciality since the start. The salon serves desserts you can only eat here, like a Mont Blanc piped to order and a baked Alaska flambéed at your table, and the shop sells Cha no Ka, the strong-matcha langue de chat biscuits.

Demachiyanagi Ota Shrine is a small branch shrine of Kamigamo, dedicated to Ame-no-Uzume. Its marsh, the Ota no Sawa, fills with wild purple kakitsubata irises in May, a colony that's been a protected natural monument since 1939 and that Fujiwara no Toshinari wrote a poem about in the Heian period.

Demachiyanagi Shimogamo Saryo has served Kyoto cuisine and tea kaiseki next to Shimogamo Shrine since 1856, in a sukiya-style house with three tea rooms. The Takano river runs below it, and from the upstairs rooms you can see Daimonji. Kundo Koyama is the current owner.

Demachiyanagi You reach Shimogamo Shrine through Tadasu no Mori, a 12.4-hectare forest with clear streams that runs from the main halls south to Kawai Shrine. The shrine's two main halls are National Treasures, 53 more buildings are Important Cultural Properties, and it's been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1994. The Aoi Matsuri, its festival with Kamigamo Shrine, falls on 15 May every year.

Demachiyanagi Yuwado is a small gelato shop at the west entrance to Shimogamo Shrine. Everything's made in the shop's own kitchen, with seasonal fruit from Kyoto's central wholesale market or straight from the growers, no colourings and no eggs. The plain milk and cream gelato has been the bestseller since it opened in 2019.

Fushimi Aburacho is a sake shop on the Otesuji arcade that specialises in Fushimi sake, mostly ginjo and daiginjo. At its bar counter you can taste 80 to 90 of them from the town's breweries before you buy.

Fushimi Choken-ji, known locally as the Benten of Shima, is the only temple in Kyoto whose main image is Benzaiten. It was founded in 1699, when the Fushimi magistrate developed the Chushojima district, and you'll spot it by its red walls and Ryugu-style gate.

Fushimi Fujinomori Shrine dates back about 1,800 years by its own account, and it's the shrine of luck in contests and guardian of horses. It calls itself the birthplace of the 5 May iris festival, and that day, during the Fujinomori Festival (1 to 5 May), riders perform kakeuma stunts on the south approach at 13:00 and 15:00.

Fushimi Fushimi Inari Taisha is the head shrine of Japan's roughly 30,000 Inari shrines, and its deity was enshrined here in 711. Giving a torii, as a prayer or as thanks for one answered, was common by the start of the Edo period, and about 10,000 of them now line the paths up 233 m Mount Inari behind the main hall.

Fushimi Emperor Meiji, who died in 1912, is buried here on the site of Fushimi Castle's main enclosure, under a round-on-square mound finished that September. Empress Shoken's tomb sits just to the east.

Fushimi Fushimi Sakagura Koji is an alley of eight restaurants (sushi, kushikatsu and oden, teppanyaki, ramen and more) in the block between the Otesuji and Nayamachi arcades, plus Sakagura, a counter over 23 m long pouring more than 120 sakes from the 18 breweries of the Fushimi Sake Brewers Association.

Fushimi Fushimi's name was once written with the character for water, thanks to its groundwater, and about 20 breweries still make sake here. Around Gekkeikan's storehouses the Horikawa canal, once the outer moat of Fushimi Castle, runs between willows and cherry trees.

Fushimi Fushimi Yume Hyakushu is a cafe and souvenir shop in Gekkeikan's old head office, a 1919 building with Western details. The Fushimi Tourism Association runs it, so it's also an information point, and the shop sells sake from 15 Fushimi breweries.

Fushimi Gekkeikan, founded in Fushimi in 1637, runs this museum in one of its sake storehouses, built in 1909. Old brewing tools listed as Kyoto City folk cultural property fill one room and the brewery's history another. A well here draws the groundwater used in the brewery next door, and you finish at the tasting counter.

Fushimi Gokonomiya is the guardian shrine of old Fushimi, named for a fragrant spring that the shrine says welled up here in 862. The Gokosui is on the Environment Ministry's list of Japan's 100 best springs, and the main hall, built in 1605 on Tokugawa Ieyasu's orders, is an Important Cultural Property.

Fushimi Jonangu was founded in 794, with the new capital, to guard its southern approach, and people still come to pray for protection from unlucky directions and for safe travel. Its garden, Rakusuien, covers about 30,000 square metres, and the weeping plums and camellias from mid February to March are the big draw.

Fushimi Kizakura Kappa Country is the Fushimi brewer Kizakura's complex, with a restaurant pouring its sake and beer brewed on site. The free Kappa Gallery covers sake making and the kappa, the river imp that's been the brewer's mascot, with its TV ads from the late 1950s on and original drawings by Shimizu Kon and Kojima Ko.

Fushimi Komyo-in, a Tofuku-ji sub-temple founded in 1391, goes by the nickname moss temple of rainbows. Its main garden, Hashin-tei, is a 1939 dry garden by Shigemori Mirei, with moss, white sand and standing stones set in diagonal lines, and the tea house Ragetsu-an (1957) is placed so you watch the moon rise over it from the garden.

Fushimi Nezameya has fed pilgrims on the Fushimi Inari approach for 500 years, by its own count. The shop says Toyotomi Hideyoshi named it after stopping for tea here early one morning, when nowhere else was open. The menu runs to inari-zushi, saba-zushi, kitsune udon, eel and grilled quail.

Fushimi Otesuji is Fushimi's main covered shopping street, running east to west, with Fushimi-Momoyama Station right on it and Momoyama-Goryomae a minute away. The road was laid out in 1594 from the main gate of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Fushimi Castle, which is where the name comes from. It's had a roof since 1971, and the current solar-panelled arcade went up in 1997.

Fushimi Sennyu-ji is known as Mitera, the imperial family's temple. Emperor Shijo's funeral was held here in 1242, as were those of the Edo-period emperors from Go-Yozei to Komei, and Shijo and the emperors from Go-Mizunoo to Ninko lie in the Tsukinowa mausoleum in its grounds. The Buddha hall, rebuilt in 1668 by shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna, has a cloud dragon painted on its ceiling by Kano Tanyu.

Fushimi Teradaya was an inn for passengers on Fushimi's river boats. Nine Satsuma samurai died in a clash here in 1862, and in 1866 Sakamoto Ryoma escaped an attack by the Fushimi magistrate's men. The inn burned in the Battle of Toba-Fushimi in 1868, and today's building went up afterwards.

Fushimi Tofuku-ji is a Rinzai Zen head temple, built over 19 years from 1236 and named after Nara's two great temples, Todai-ji and Kofuku-ji. From the covered Tsutenkyo bridge you look down into the Sengyokukan valley of maples, and the Hojo is ringed by four gardens Shigemori Mirei made in 1939.

Fushimi Torisei is the chicken restaurant of Yamamoto Honke, the Fushimi brewer of Shinsei sake, and it's been open since 23 January 1976. It's set in a sake storehouse around 100 years old, and the drink people come for is unpasteurised genshu poured straight from a tank.

Fushimi Tsuki no Kurabito serves Japanese food with Gekkeikan sake in a building Gekkeikan put up in 1913, once its rice-polishing mill, and you eat under its old beams. The house special is a hotpot whose broth is made with a whole bottle of Gekkeikan daiginjo, and the tofu is made in house.

Kitano Sawaya has made awamochi, millet cakes, a few steps from Kitano Tenmangu since 1682, when it opened as a teahouse for the shrine. There are only two kinds, wrapped in smooth red bean paste or rolled in kinako, and they pound fresh batches through the day, so yours will likely still be warm.

Kitano Daisen-in, founded in 1509, is a Daitoku-ji subtemple you can visit any day of the year. Its abbot's hall of 1513 is a National Treasure and the oldest Zen guest hall in the complex, and the dry garden around it turns a waterfall, a river and the open sea into standing rocks and white sand.

Kitano Daishogun Hachi Shrine was founded in 794, when the capital moved to Kyoto, to guard the north-west corner of the palace, the direction yin-yang lore calls the gate of heaven. Its Hotoku-den hall holds 80 wooden statues of the star god Daishogun from the 10th to 13th centuries, 50 of them in armour, arranged as a three-dimensional star mandala.

Kitano Daitoku-ji, head temple of the Daitoku-ji school of Rinzai Zen, was founded in 1315 and rebuilt by the monk Ikkyu after the Onin War. Hideyoshi held Oda Nobunaga's funeral here, and Sen no Rikyu added the upper storey of the Sanmon gate in 1589. The statue of himself Rikyu placed inside is said to have angered Hideyoshi, one of the reasons given for Rikyu's death.

Kitano Daitokuji Ikkyu has cooked Daitoku-ji's shojin ryori, the temple's vegetarian cuisine, since the late 1400s, and says the monk Ikkyu gave it its name. Meals come as a fuchidaka box or as a full honzen spread on red lacquer trays, with its own Daitokuji-fu, gisei-dofu and ikada-gobo among the dishes.

Kitano Dorato is a honey shop in a Nishijin weavers' row house about 140 years old. It stocks around 50 kinds from around the world, clover, avocado, cherry blossom and pineapple among them.

Kitano Funaokayama is the low hill used as the northern reference point when Heian-kyo was laid out. Kenkun Shrine, founded in 1869 on Emperor Meiji's order to honour Oda Nobunaga, sits on top, and from its grounds you can see Mount Hiei and the Daimonji mountain.

Kitano Hirano Shrine grows about 400 cherry trees of some 60 varieties, many of which started here, so something's in flower for about six weeks from mid-March. The shrine came here from Nara with the capital in 794, and its paired main halls of 1625 and 1632 are an Important Cultural Property.

Kitano Ichiwa sells one thing, aburi-mochi. Small pieces of rice cake go onto bamboo skewers, get toasted over charcoal and come dipped in white miso sauce, at a teahouse on the stone path outside Imamiya Shrine's east gate.

Kitano Imamiya Shrine goes back to 994, when the gods of plague were carried up nearby Funaokayama in two portable shrines to calm them, and it took its present name in 1001. Its Yasurai Matsuri on the second Sunday of April is one of Kyoto's three strange festivals. Keishoin, the Nishijin-born mother of the shogun Tsunayoshi, helped revive its festivals in the Edo period.

Kitano Kamishichiken is Kyoto's oldest geisha district, the teahouse quarter on the east approach to Kitano Tenmangu. The name means "upper seven houses", after seven teahouses built from timber left over from repairs to the shrine in the 1400s. Its crest of five dumplings is for the mitarashi dango served to Hideyoshi at his great Kitano tea party of 1587.

Kitano Kitano Tenmangu is the head shrine of the roughly 12,000 Tenjin shrines across Japan, founded in 947 for Sugawara no Michizane, the scholar students still pray to before exams. Toyotomi Hideyori built the main hall in 1607 and it's a National Treasure. About 1,500 plum trees of 50 varieties flower here from January to late March.

Kitano Kuginuki Jizo, officially Shakuzo-ji, is a small temple on Senbon-dori said to have been founded by Kukai in 819. People come to its Jizo to have their pain pulled out, and the walls around its hall are covered in thank-you plaques, each with two long nails and a pair of pincers fixed to it.

Kitano The Nishijin Textile Center is the weaving industry association's showroom on Horikawa-dori. Its third-floor archive keeps Japan's first home-built wooden Jacquard loom, a Kyoto City cultural property, and puts on three or four themed shows a year of obi, kimono and folding screens.

Kitano Oimatsu makes sweets for the tea ceremony, and its Kitano shop sits in Kamishichiken on the east approach to Kitano Tenmangu. You can talk to the confectioners about sweets for a tea gathering or a wedding, and from April it sells natsukan-to, made with summer oranges.

Kitano Sarasa Nishijin is a cafe in the old Fujinomori-yu bathhouse, which closed in 1999. The coffered ceiling and the walls of Japanese majolica tiles are still there, and in the evening you can sit where the baths were with a beer or a glass of wine.

Kitano Seimei Shrine honours Abe no Seimei, the Heian-era yin-yang diviner, and his five-pointed star crest hangs on the torii where most shrines put their name. The spout of the Seimei well is turned at the start of spring each year to face that year's lucky direction.

Kitano Senbon Enma-do's hall holds a 2.4 m wooden statue of Enma, king of the underworld, flanked by two clerks like a court of judgement. It stands at the head of the old Suzaku-oji avenue, where the dead were once carried out of the city, so Kyoto families come here in August to welcome their ancestors' spirits home. The 6 m stone stupa of 1386 in the north-west corner is said to be a memorial to Murasaki Shikibu.

Kitano Senbon Shakado's main hall went up in 1227 and came through centuries of wars and fires, so it's the oldest building in central Kyoto and a National Treasure. The treasure hall holds Kaikei's Ten Great Disciples and Jokei's Six Kannon of 1224. Look for the Okame mound, a memorial to the master carpenter's wife, whose idea saved the hall after he cut a pillar too short.

Kitano Senbon Tamajuken has made Kyoto sweets on Senbon-dori since 1938, on the spot where the first Tamajuken began as a sideline for a family of tapestry weavers. Its signature sweet, Nishijin Fumi, rolls black-sesame bean paste in a sheet of habutae mochi, shaped like a bolt of kimono silk.

Kitano Shinme has served drinks on Senbon-dori since 1934 and is said to be Kyoto's oldest izakaya. The fish comes from the market every day, so the menu changes daily, and the house hot sake, also called Shinme, is a blend of six sakes. The arched bridge inside dates from a 1961 renovation.

Kitano On the 25th of every month Kitano Tenmangu holds its fair day, and stalls crowd the shrine's approach all day. The date honours Michizane, who was born on 25 June and died on 25 February. January's Hatsu-Tenjin and December's Shimai-Tenjin are the big ones, with about 1,000 stalls and some 150,000 people.

Kitano Toyouke-jaya is the lunch counter of Toyoukeya Yamamoto, a tofu maker in the Kitano area since 1897, right across Imadegawa-dori from Kitano Tenmangu. It opened in 1992 to serve yudofu made with its own nigari silken tofu, then came up with tofu on rice, the Toyouke-don. Fresh yuba and nama-fu bowls followed in 1999.

Kinkakuji Fruit Parlor Cricket has been a fruit specialist since 1974, opened by an owner who traded at Kyoto's central wholesale market. Order the jelly served in a hollowed-out grapefruit, orange or lemon, with the peel as its lid. It's made less sweet on purpose, so you eat it with the whipped cream on the side and squeeze the lid over the top.

Kinkakuji The painter Domoto Insho designed this museum himself, inside and out, and opened it in 1966. His patterns cover the outer walls, the door handles, the stained glass and 18 kinds of garden chairs, and the building became a registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2025. The shows rotate through his own work, made on the idea that true tradition means breaking with it.

Kinkakuji Keishun-in is a small Myoshin-ji subtemple with four gardens by Gyokuenbo, a pupil of Kobori Enshu, laid out to trace a monk's path to enlightenment. Its founder, Tsuda Hidenori, was Oda Nobunaga's grandson, and the buildings have kept the same shape for about 400 years. The gold sliding doors of pine and a crescent moon are by the Edo painter Kano Sansetsu.

Kinkakuji Kinkaku-ji's formal name is Rokuon-ji, and it started life as the retirement villa of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who began building here in 1397. The pavilion's top two floors are covered in pure gold leaf over lacquer, there's a phoenix on the roof, and the garden around it centres on the Kyoko-chi pond, about 6,600 square metres. Each floor is built in a different style, from palace to samurai house to Zen hall.

Kinkakuji Ritsumeikan University opened this museum in 1992 and calls it the world's first peace museum run by a university. The permanent exhibition, rebuilt for the reopening in September 2023, starts with a timeline, then turns to four themes, from Japan's colonies and occupied lands and the harm Japan both did and suffered in the Fifteen Years' War to human security and world peace.

Kinkakuji Mancho is a Kyoto cuisine restaurant facing Myoshin-ji's north gate, about five minutes' walk from Ninna-ji. The house special is the Tsurezure bento, two tiers of seasonal dishes with sashimi and soup, named after Tsurezuregusa, the essays of Yoshida Kenko, who lived nearby at Narabigaoka.

Kinkakuji Myoshin-ji is the head temple of a Rinzai Zen school of about 3,300 temples, and more than 40 subtemples stand in its grounds. In the Hatto hall, Kano Tan'yu's dragon looks down from the ceiling, and the hall also keeps a temple bell that's a National Treasure. Look out for the Edo-period bathhouse, known as the Akechi bath, built to pray for Akechi Mitsuhide.

Kinkakuji Emperor Uda finished Ninna-ji in 888, and imperial princes served as its head priests until 1867. The Kondo main hall is the oldest surviving Shishinden, the ceremonial hall of the Imperial Palace, moved here between 1624 and 1643 and now a National Treasure. The five-storey pagoda went up in 1644, and in early to mid April the low, late-blooming Omuro cherries flower inside the middle gate.

Kinkakuji Behind Ninna-ji, a 3 km path loops over Mount Joju past 88 small halls, a copy of Shikoku's 88-temple pilgrimage. In 1827 a Ninna-ji head priest had sand brought back from each Shikoku temple and buried under the halls, so people who couldn't make the trip could walk this one. On a clear day you can see over the city as far as Fushimi.

Kinkakuji Ryoan-ji's rock garden is 15 stones set in 248 square metres of white sand, and nobody knows what its maker meant by them. Hosokawa Katsumoto founded the temple in 1450 on a villa of the Tokudaiji family, and the garden probably dates from 1499, when the abbot's hall was built. The earthen wall around it is 180 cm high, made of clay mixed with rapeseed oil.

Kinkakuji Shunko-in is a Myoshin-ji subtemple founded in 1590 by Horio Yoshiharu, later the first lord of Matsue. It keeps the Nanbanji bell, an Important Cultural Property, and a front garden laid out to stand for the Ise shrines and Ise Bay. The temple and garden aren't open for ordinary visits, so you come here for Zen sessions in English with the priest Takafumi Zenryu Kawakami.

Kinkakuji Taizo-in is one of the oldest of Myoshin-ji's subtemples, founded around 1404, and it has two very different gardens. The dry Motonobu garden was laid out by the painter Kano Motonobu, while the Yoko-en is a pond garden you walk around. Near the abbot's hall hangs a copy of Josetsu's Hyonen-zu, a National Treasure the temple calls the oldest ink painting in Japan.

Kinkakuji Ashikaga Takauji founded Toji-in in 1341 at the foot of Mount Kinugasa, and it became the family temple of the Ashikaga shoguns. The Reikoden hall holds wooden statues of the shoguns, and one of Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Takauji's grave is a stone pagoda behind the abbot's hall. The Fuyo pond, in a garden said to be by Muso Soseki, is shaped like a lotus flower.

Kinkakuji Waratenjin, formally Shikichi Jinja, is the shrine people visit to pray for a safe birth. Its charm holds a piece of straw, and the old saying goes that a knot in the straw means a boy and no knot means a girl. The shrine believes it was founded before Kyoto became the capital.

Gion Atarashi-yu has been open for more than a century on Furumonzen-dori, near Yasaka Shrine, Chion-in and Tatsumi Inari. It has a sauna, a cold bath, an electric bath, a jet bath and a herbal bath, and it stays open until midnight.

Kitano Choja-yu opened in 1917 and keeps its early Showa look, from the curved gable over the entrance to the koi pond, stone lanterns, coffered ceiling and wicker clothes baskets inside. The tile pictures show Kinkaku-ji in snow on the men's side and Kiyomizu-dera in cherry blossom on the women's, and the water is well water heated over a wood fire. Kyoto City named the building a historic landscape building in August 2025.

Arashiyama Fufu no Yu is a day spa a minute's walk from Hankyu Arashiyama Station. Its water is Arashiyama Onsen, a simple, weakly alkaline hot spring at 35.2°C at the source. Each side has an indoor bath of the spring water, an outdoor bath, a silky bath, a cold bath and a hot sauna with a view, and the women's side adds a mist sauna. The outdoor cooling-off area has reclining chairs within earshot of the Katsura River.

Kitano Funaoka Onsen was built as the bathhouse of Funaoka-ro, a restaurant inn, and its 1923 changing room and the old inn building have been registered Tangible Cultural Properties since 2003. Look up in the changing room, where the transoms and ceiling are decorated with unusual wood carvings, and at the curved gable on the Kuramaguchi-dori front, added in 1928. It's still a working neighbourhood sento, with an open-air bath, a sauna, an electric bath and a cold plunge.

Ginkakuji Ginsui-yu is the neighbourhood sento in Jodoji, a couple of minutes' walk from the Philosopher's Path. It runs on fully softened water, which the bath recommends for sensitive skin, and has a sauna with a TV, a cold bath, an electric bath, a jet bath and a herbal bath.

Kyoto Station Goko-yu is a two-floor sento near Omiya-Gojo. Upstairs are a hot steam sauna and a far-infrared one, a cold bath of well water, and a bath with Bad Gastein radium ore sunk in the tub, indoors but open to the outside air, so it feels like an outdoor bath. Downstairs there are six more baths. The herbal bath changes about once a week, and a snack counter sells draught beer for afterwards.

Demachiyanagi Kamogawa-yu opened on Kitaoji-dori in 1926, and Yutonamisha took it over in 2023. The bathing room is small and tiled in light blue, brown and pink, with a big tub in the middle, which you don't often see in Kyoto. The water is groundwater heated over a wood fire, and both sides have a sauna and a cold bath.

Kawaramachi Tamanoyu has been the neighbourhood bath on Oshikoji-dori since 1894, about five minutes' jog from the Kamo River and the Imperial Palace grounds. It's small, with a sauna, a cold bath, a jet bath, an electric bath and deep and shallow tubs. You can bathe here with tattoos, which the bath says plainly on its own site.

Kyoto Station Umeyu sits on the Takase canal, a 15-minute walk from Kyoto Station, under a big neon sign that lights up red, yellow and green at night. The "sauna" in its name supposedly dates from when the sign went up and a sento with a sauna was still rare. Yutonamisha, a company that takes over sento to keep them open, has run it since 2015, when it was about to close, and both sides have a dry sauna, a cold bath, an electric bath and a herbal bath.

Fushimi Shinchi-yu opened in 1931 near Chushojima Station, and its old building still catches the eye from the street. The water is groundwater from Fushimi's sake-brewing district, which regulars say feels soft. There are three tubs including a jet bath, plus a cold bath and a steam sauna.

Arashiyama Tenzan no Yu is a hot spring complex three minutes' walk from Arisugawa on the Randen tram, on a natural spring that rises in Sagano. The Kinkaku no Yu outdoor bath uses the spring water untouched, and it's rich enough in iron to turn brown in the air, while the Ginkaku no Yu has the iron taken out. Both sides have saunas with aufguss sessions every two hours from 1pm to 11pm, and there's a restaurant and a tatami lounge for afterwards.

Nijo Inari-yu is a neighbourhood sento just south of Sanjo-dori, a short walk south of Shinsen-en garden and Nijo Castle. It runs on mineral-rich groundwater and has a far-infrared sauna, a cold bath, a jet bath and a herbal bath.

Amanohashidate Amanohashidate is a 3.6 km sandbar in Miyazu Bay on the Sea of Japan, covered in about 5,400 pine trees. It's one of Japan's Three Views, with Matsushima and Miyajima. You can walk it in about 50 minutes or cycle it in 20, and from Kasamatsu Park on the north shore you're meant to look at it upside down, bent over and peering between your legs (mata-nozoki started here).

Daigo Daigo-ji climbs from the foot of Mount Daigo to its summit, and its five-storey pagoda, finished in 951, is the oldest wooden building in Kyoto Prefecture. Toyotomi Hideyoshi threw his famous cherry blossom party here in 1598, planting 700 trees for it, and he designed the Sanbo-in garden. Kamidaigo, the original temple on the summit, is about an hour's steep climb from the trailhead.

Mt Hiei Enryaku-ji covers the top of Mount Hiei on the border of Kyoto and Shiga, with Lake Biwa below on one side and Kyoto on the other. Saicho founded it some 1,200 years ago, and so many founders of later Buddhist schools trained here that it's called the mother mountain of Japanese Buddhism. The temple is spread over three areas, Todo, Saito and Yokawa.

Hikone Hikone Castle's keep is one of five in Japan listed as a National Treasure, with Himeji, Matsumoto, Inuyama and Matsue. Work started in 1604 and took about 20 years, and the stone walls, turrets and moats inside the middle moat survive in very good shape. The ticket also gets you into Genkyu-en, the garden of the lords' lower residence.

Himeji Himeji Castle is the White Heron Castle, named for its white walls, and few castles in Japan are as well preserved. It reached its present form in 1609, and you can climb the five-tiered main keep for a view over the whole city. It's been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1993.

Takao Jingo-ji is a Shingon temple in the Takao hills north-west of the city. Kukai, who brought Shingon to Japan, was its abbot for 14 years from 809, and the temple took its present name when it was handed to him in 824. From the lookout you can throw small clay discs called kawarake into the valley to get rid of bad luck, and it's a popular spot for autumn leaves.

Katsura Katsura Imperial Villa was built in stages over almost 50 years from 1615 by Prince Toshihito and his son Toshitada, and since fire never reached it, the buildings still look as they did then. The path around its big, irregular pond twists and turns so you never see the whole garden at once, and four tea pavilions sit along the way.

Takao Kozan-ji is the temple of the Choju-giga, the Heian and Kamakura scrolls of rabbits, monkeys and frogs at play like people. The monk Myoe rebuilt it in 1206 and grew tea here, and the temple still picks tea from a small field every year that it calls the oldest tea garden in Japan. The Sekisui-in hall is a National Treasure.

Kurama and Kibune Two mountain villages north of the city, joined by a hiking trail over the ridge. Kurama-dera is where, legend says, the young Ushiwakamaru learned swordsmanship from the tengu, and the path to its inner sanctuary crosses the Ki-no-ne Michi, a stretch of ground covered in cedar roots. In the next valley, Kifune Shrine honours the god of water, and in summer the restaurants along the Kibune River serve meals on platforms over the water.

Nara Nara's big draw is Todai-ji and its bronze Buddha, almost 15 m tall, first dedicated in 752, and its head has been recast twice since. The hall around it dates from 1709 and is only about 60 percent as wide as the original, yet it's still one of the largest wooden buildings in the world. Deer wander the grounds, and they're a protected natural monument.

Ohara Ohara is a valley in the hills north-east of Kyoto, and the main sight is Sanzen-in, a Tendai temple. Its Yusei-en garden is moss under cedar and cypress, with small stone jizo figures grown over with the same moss. The Ojo-gokuraku-in hall has a ceiling shaped like the bottom of a boat, raised to fit the big Amida triad inside.

Omihachiman Omihachiman grew up below Hachimanyama Castle, built by Toyotomi Hidetsugu, Hideyoshi's nephew, and it did well as a stop on the Lake Biwa shipping routes. Its old moat, Hachiman-bori, is still lined with willows and white-walled storehouses, and the stretch between Hakuun-bashi and Meiji-bashi turns up in a lot of period dramas. The way to see it is a 30-minute ride in a wooden boat.

Matsuo Saiho-ji is Kokedera, the moss temple, and Muso Soseki laid out the first form of its garden in the 1300s (the Ashikaga shoguns modelled the Golden and Silver Pavilions on it). The moss came later, after the river kept flooding the grounds. Since 1977 it's only been open to small groups who book ahead.

Shugakuin Retired Emperor Gomizuno-o built Shugakuin Imperial Villa on the slopes of Mount Hiei between 1656 and 1659. It's three gardens on three levels, joined by pine-lined paths through rice paddies. From the Rinuntei pavilion at the top you look across the Yokuryuchi pond to the whole of Kyoto and the western mountains.

Uji Uji is 17 minutes from Kyoto Station on the JR Miyakoji Rapid, and you go for Byodo-in. Its Phoenix Hall was finished in 1053 to hold a 2.4 m Amida Buddha by the sculptor Jocho. The approach to the temple is about 160 m of tea shops, and across the river the main hall of Ujigami Shrine is said to be the oldest shrine building in Japan.

Neighbourhood guide Free temples and late ramen a few minutes from the platforms

Neighbourhood guide Art museums, Meiji gardens and Nanzen-ji along the Lake Biwa Canal

Neighbourhood guide The shogun's castle, with the Shinsengumi's Mibu a walk south

Neighbourhood guide Free palace walks, a park that never shuts, and the court's old shops

Neighbourhood guide Three World Heritage temples on one road under Mount Kinugasa

About this Kyoto travel map

This is a free interactive map of Kyoto's sights and neighbourhoods, with 314 places. Fushimi Inari Taisha, Kiyomizu-dera, the Arashiyama bamboo grove and Nishiki Market are on it, and so are coffee houses that opened in the 1930s and a public bath from 1923. Filter by category or tag, search by name or neighbourhood, save favourites, and export them to Google Maps as a walking route. Every place links to a full page with the nearest station or bus stop, the cost and how long to allow.

Top Kyoto sights on the map

The best-known sights, area by area. Each name opens the place's own page, and the map shows everything else around it.

Higashiyama and Kiyomizu-dera

Kiyomizu-dera · Temple
Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka · Neighbourhood
Kyoto National Museum · Museum
Sanjusangendo · Temple

Gion

Yasaka Shrine · Shrine
Hanamikoji-dori · Neighbourhood
Gion Shirakawa · Neighbourhood
Kennin-ji · Temple

Kawaramachi and Pontocho

Nishiki Market · Market
Pontocho · Neighbourhood
Teramachi and Shinkyogoku Arcades · Shopping
Kiyamachi-dori · Neighbourhood

Fushimi

Arashiyama and Sagano

Arashiyama Bamboo Grove · Park
Tenryu-ji · Temple
Togetsukyo Bridge · Landmark
Okochi Sanso · Park

Kinkaku-ji and Kitano

Ryoan-ji · Temple
Ninna-ji · Temple
Kitano Tenmangu · Shrine
Kinkaku-ji · Temple

Ginkaku-ji, the Philosopher's Path and Okazaki

Philosopher's Path · Neighbourhood
Nanzen-ji · Temple
Heian Shrine · Shrine
Ginkaku-ji · Temple

Nijo Castle and the Imperial Palace

Nijo Castle · Landmark
Kyoto Imperial Palace · Landmark
Shimogamo Shrine · Shrine
Shinsen-en · Temple

Kyoto Station

Kyoto Station Building · Landmark
Kyoto Tower · Viewpoint
To-ji · Temple
Higashi Hongan-ji · Temple

Plan an itinerary with the map

Tap the heart on any place to save it. Open Saved and press Plan my days, and your saved places and events are sorted into days by area, with walking or train times between stops. Open saved places in Google Maps turns up to ten of them into walking directions. Set your trip dates and the Events view shows what's on while you're here. Saved places stay in your browser, and there's no account.

Is this Kyoto travel map free to use?

Yes. It's free, with no account or app download. Saved places and events stay in your browser, so your shortlist is waiting next time you open it.

Who makes this map?

Daniel, who lived in Kyoto for a while, near Shijo-Omiya station, and also makes Roam Tokyo. All 314 places are checked against their own official pages, and the collection is edited as places change.

What does each place on the map tell you?

Its nearest station or bus stop, the cost and how long to allow, with a tip for most of them, and the places nearby with walking times. Every place has its own page too.

Can I plan a Kyoto itinerary with the map?

Yes. Every place shows what's nearby with walking times, and you can export any shortlist of saved places to Google Maps as walking directions, up to ten stops at a time.

How do I get between places in Kyoto?

Each place names its nearest station or bus stop. Most are on the Keihan Main Line, the Tozai or Karasuma subway lines, a JR line or the Hankyu Kyoto Line. The rest are on the Keifuku or Kintetsu lines, or a bus route.

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About this Kyoto travel map

Top Kyoto sights on the map

Higashiyama and Kiyomizu-dera

Gion

Kawaramachi and Pontocho

Fushimi

Arashiyama and Sagano

Kinkaku-ji and Kitano

Ginkaku-ji, the Philosopher's Path and Okazaki

Nijo Castle and the Imperial Palace

Kyoto Station

Plan an itinerary with the map

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