Sanbe Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
三瓶温泉 · Shimane
Sanbe Onsen (三瓶温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Shimane. 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
In the Sanbe area of Daisen-Oki National Park, Shimane, at 400–500 metres on the southern skirt of a pass.
The water is said to have come up with a great earthquake some 1,300 years ago. By the turn of the 19th century it was busy with people taking cures, and the present town took shape in the Meiji era. It was designated a National Health Resort Hot Spring in 1959.
It yields 1,174 litres a minute at 34.8 °C — heavy with iron, cool, and clouded reddish-brown. Some inns offer it unheated, straight from the source; one uses a cedar sake cask as a tub.
Mt. Sanbe next door appears in the 8th-century Izumo Fudoki, in the myth in which the gods haul land across the sea and tie it down. Lava domes ring the old crater floor and grassland spreads below. A beech forest on the northern slope is a natural monument.
In winter the town builds several thousand small snow huts and lights a candle in each of them on one night. In summer more than a thousand wind bells are hung through the streets. The place also serves as a base for visiting the Iwami Ginzan silver mine, a World Heritage site.
Sources: 環境省 三瓶温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 87 cm |
| Rank | 44 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 1 of 2 in Shimane |
| Against the median of 77 | -31 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 90 cm 41–131 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
3 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 三瓶温泉4号泉 | 0.4 km | 39.2℃ warm | 5.6 mildly acidic | chloride | 1958 |
| 三瓶温泉3号泉 | 0.4 km | 42℃ hot | 5.4 mildly acidic | chloride | 1958 |
| 久部温泉 | 0.8 km | 32.8℃ lukewarm | — | chloride | 1972 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Mount Sanbe三瓶山 | Nature | 3.1 km |
| Shimane Nature Museum of Mt. Sanbe島根県立三瓶自然館 | Museum | 4.5 km |
| Sanbe Azukihara Buried Forest三瓶小豆原埋没林 | Nature | 7.5 km |
| Mononobe Shrine物部神社 (大田市) | Shrine | 11.2 km |
| Susa Shrine須佐神社 (出雲市) | Shrine | 17 km |
| Iwami Ginzan Silver Mine石見銀山 | Nature | 17.3 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
Up to five within 40 km, straight-line, nearest first. Quality rank is out of the 397 Japanese ski areas.
| Ski area | Distance | Quality rank |
|---|---|---|
| Kotobiki Forest Park Ski Area | 15 km | 397 of 397 |
| Ski Park Kanbiki | 38 km | 436 of 397 |
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.