Otari Onsen
小谷温泉 · Nagano
Otari Onsen (小谷温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Nagano. We measured how much snow its winters bring, using the same method as for the 3,108 ski areas on this site.
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 733 cm |
| Rank | 1 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 1 of 5 in Nagano |
| Against the median of 77 | +614 cm median 119 cm |
| Season to season | 129 cm 689–818 cm across three winters |
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"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.
How this place came to be
Of the 79 onsen towns we measured, this one sits in the deepest snow.
The spring is said to date from 1555, though the stories do not agree. One says a retainer of Takeda Shingen found it during the Kawanakajima campaign. Another connects it to Iimori Morisharu, who had fought the Takeda the year before. Nobody has settled which is true, and probably nobody will — it is a story about a mountain in the middle of a civil war.
Today there is exactly one inn, Yamada Ryokan, whose main hall and five other buildings are registered as national tangible cultural properties. It stands at 850 m at the foot of Mount Amakazari, and in winter it is buried.
Sources: Go NAGANO 長野県公式観光サイト · 日本温泉協会 国民保養温泉地「小谷」
Ski areas nearby
Up to five within 40 km, straight-line, nearest first. Quality rank is out of the 395 Japanese ski areas.
| Ski area | Distance | Quality rank |
|---|---|---|
| Itoigawa Seaside Valley Ski Resort | 11 km | 281 of 395 |
| Hakuba Cortina | 13 km | 74 of 395 |
| Hakuba Norikura Onsen Ski Resort | 14 km | 36 of 395 |
| Myoko Suginohara | 14 km | 52 of 395 |
| Akakura Kanko Ski Resort | 16 km | 92 of 395 |
About these snowfall figures
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 are working on replacing these estimates with observed values.