Ryujin Onsen-kyo — Snowfall and Nearby Ski Areas
龍神温泉郷 · Wakayama
Ryujin Onsen-kyo (龍神温泉郷) 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
Ryujin village in Tanabe, Wakayama. Forest covers 95% of its 255 km², and seven-tenths of the village lies above 500 metres. The Hidaka river rises on Mt. Gomadan — "the roof of Kishu" — and some 140 hamlets are strung along it.
The spring is said to have been found by En no Gyoja, the mountain ascetic, and the baths opened later by Kukai after a dragon king appeared to him in a dream — which is where the name Ryujin, dragon god, comes from. It has about thirteen centuries behind it and is counted among the three springs of Japan said to make the skin beautiful.
In the Edo period the Kishu domain took an interest: the first lord, Tokugawa Yorinobu, had two lodges built here for his own visits, the Upper and Lower Palace. Both are inns today, and the Upper Palace building is on the national register of tangible cultural properties.
Komatagawa, five hundred metres downstream, was opened in 1977. Beside it stands the Tenchu storehouse, a prefectural historic site: eight loyalist samurai plotting against the shogunate are said to have been imprisoned in it in 1863.
The autumn colour along the Koya-Ryujin skyline road is among the best in the prefecture, and Wakayama's highest peak stands in this village.
Sources: 環境省 龍神温泉郷 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 16 cm |
| Rank | 58 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 1 of 2 in Wakayama |
| Against the median of 77 | -102 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 28 cm 7–35 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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Ryūjin Onsen龍神温泉 | Hot spring town | 6.1 km |
| Nakahechi中辺路 | Shrine | 15.8 km |
| Kōya-Ryūjin Quasi-National Park高野龍神国定公園 | Nature | 16 km |
| Yunomine Onsen湯の峰温泉 | Hot spring town | 18.3 km |
| Kumano Hongū Taisha熊野本宮大社 | Shrine | 19.1 km |
| Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range紀伊山地の霊場と参詣道 | Historic site | 19.5 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.