Kumano Hongu Onsen-kyo — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
熊野本宮温泉郷 · Wakayama
Kumano Hongu Onsen-kyo (熊野本宮温泉郷) is a nationally designated onsen town in Wakayama. We measured how much snow its winters bring, using the same method as for the 3,069 ski areas on this site.
How this place came to be
Three springs scattered along tributaries of the Kumano river between 70 and 150 metres — Yunomine, Watarase and Kawayu — under one name. They lie inside Yoshino-Kumano National Park and form part of the World Heritage site "Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range." Yunomine and Kawayu were designated in 1957; Watarase joined them in 1985.
Yunomine is said to date back some 1,800 years, to the reign of Emperor Seimu, and is often called the oldest hot spring in Japan. Its Tsubo-yu — a tiny bath in a cleft of rock — is where pilgrims purified themselves on the way to the Kumano shrines, and it was inscribed as part of the World Heritage site in 2004. Fourteen sources rise here, eight of them in use, at 53.5–84.3 °C, nearly all without pumping.
Kawayu sits on the bed of the Oto river. Dig a hole in the gravel and you have a bath — the water comes up along five hundred metres of riverbank. From December to the end of February the town dams part of the river to build a single enormous open-air bath, the Sennin-buro, big enough for a crowd. The spring is said to have been found by a hermit in the Kamakura period.
Watarase, between the other two, was drilled in 1967.
The area is trialling a climate-therapy programme that pairs the baths with walks on the old pilgrim roads.
Sources: 環境省 熊野本宮温泉郷 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 5 cm |
| Rank | 68 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 2 of 2 in Wakayama |
| Against the median of 77 | -113 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 14 cm 1–15 cm, leanest to deepest of twelve |
Find a place to stay · Open in maps
"Find a place to stay" searches Rakuten Travel and contains advertising; we may earn a commission on bookings made through it. The snowfall figures and ranking are calculated independently of that.
We do not link to an official site. We have not verified URLs for all 79 towns, and guessing would send you somewhere wrong. They will be added once checked.
More places to look
Just the bath
Day passes for hot springs are sold through Asoview. Japanese only.
The list covers the whole prefecture — it cannot be narrowed to this town.
Hot springs nearby, as analysed
29 hot spring sources with published analyses lie within 3 km of the centre of this onsen town, nearest first.
| Source | Distance | Temperature | pH | Type | Analysed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 湯の峰温泉姫の湯 | 0 km | 90℃ hot | — | sulphur, bicarbonate | 1955 |
| 湯の峰温泉壺湯 | 0 km | 88℃ hot | — | sulphur, bicarbonate | 1955 |
| 湯の峰温泉洗心湯 | 0 km | 36.4℃ warm | — | simple | 1961 |
| 湯の峰温泉元湯 | 0 km | 90.5℃ hot | — | — | 1965 |
| 湯の峰温泉環湯 | 0 km | 92℃ hot | 7.6 mildly alkaline | — | 1991 |
| 湯の峰温泉環湯 | 0 km | 92.5℃ hot | — | sulphur, chloride, bicarbonate | 1985 |
These are analyses of hot spring sources, not a list of baths you can visit. They date from 1910 to 2005, many from decades ago, so today’s temperature and chemistry may differ. Names are as recorded in Japanese. Temperature and pH bands follow Japan’s standard for analysing hot springs.
Source: processed from the hot spring analysis data in the Geothermal Information Database (GRES-DB), Geological Survey of Japan, AIST
Worth seeing nearby
Places within 20 km of this onsen town, chosen from those most read about on Wikipedia, favouring places with an English Wikipedia article, and listed nearest first.
| Place | Type | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| Yunomine Onsen湯の峰温泉 | Hot spring town | 0 km |
| Wataze Onsen渡瀬温泉 | Hot spring town | 1.4 km |
| Kumano Hongū Taisha熊野本宮大社 | Shrine | 1.9 km |
| Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range紀伊山地の霊場と参詣道 | Historic site | 1.9 km |
| Tamaki Shrine玉置神社 | Shrine | 12.6 km |
| Akagi Castle赤木城 | Historic site | 19.4 km |
Based on the Japanese Wikipedia lists of sights in each prefecture, as compiled in travel-log-data (CC BY-SA 4.0). English names from Wikidata (CC0). The content of this section is available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Ski areas nearby
No ski area on this site lies within 40 km.
These snowfall figures are estimates
The snowfall shown here is an estimate produced by a weather model, not a record of what actually fell.
We compared it against 63 Japan Meteorological Agency weather stations to see how far off it is. On average it comes to about six tenths of the real figure — it runs low. And it runs low by different amounts in different places: some read barely a third of what was measured, others match almost exactly. Mountains tend to read lowest.
We tried scaling everything up by a fixed amount to correct for it. It barely helped, because the error differs from place to place.
So treat these numbers as a guide to roughly where somewhere sits, not a precise figure. There is no meaning in the gap between first and second, or between 30th and 35th. Large differences between regions are real and can be read as they are.
We considered correcting the figures against the observations. But this ranking covers 3,069 ski areas across ten countries, and only Japan can be checked against weather stations. Correcting Japan alone would lift Japanese resorts above the Alps and North America with nothing behind it. Every place here is measured the same way instead.
Where a nearby weather station can be used, we print what it actually recorded on that ski area's own page.