Totsukawa Onsen-kyo — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
十津川温泉郷 · Nara
Totsukawa Onsen-kyo (十津川温泉郷) is a nationally designated onsen town in Nara. 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 in Totsukawa village, Nara — Tosenji, Totsukawa and Kamiyu — and the only naturally hot spring in the prefecture.
Totsukawa sits at the southern tip of Nara, in the middle of the Kii peninsula. At 672.38 km² it is larger than Lake Biwa or Awaji island, a fifth of the whole prefecture: the largest village in Japan. Ninety-six per cent of it is forest and fewer than 2,900 people live there. Two of the old pilgrimage and ascetic routes crossing the village became World Heritage in 2004, and a hamlet on one of them is on the national list of a hundred beautiful villages.
Tosenji is said to have appeared in 1450 and is the oldest in the village. Records name samurai who came here for cures in the warring-states period, including a general expelled by Oda Nobunaga.
Totsukawa Onsen was found, the story goes, by a charcoal burner around 1700. It stands on the shore of a reservoir and holds most of the village's inns and shops. Its water is piped to the clinic and the care home as well, and it has a swimming pool fed by the spring and the first licensed drinking-water fountain in Nara.
Kamiyu was found by villagers in the early 1700s. A single inn stands there, and the water also rises in the riverbed itself.
On 28 June 2004 the three of them jointly declared that no bath in the area would recirculate, reheat, dilute or chlorinate its water — the first such declaration in Japan.
Sources: 環境省 十津川温泉郷 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 8 cm |
| Rank | 65 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Against the median of 77 | -110 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 21 cm 1–22 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
2 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 十津川温泉下湯 | 0.1 km | 54℃ hot | 7.3 neutral | chloride, bicarbonate | 1959 |
| 十津川温泉下湯 | 0.1 km | 54℃ hot | 7.3 neutral | — | 1959 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Totsukawa Onsen十津川温泉 | Hot spring town | 0 km |
| Tamaki Shrine玉置神社 | Shrine | 6 km |
| Kumano Hongū Taisha熊野本宮大社 | Shrine | 11.2 km |
| Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range紀伊山地の霊場と参詣道 | Historic site | 11.6 km |
| Yunomine Onsen湯の峰温泉 | Hot spring town | 12.5 km |
| Akagi Castle赤木城 | Historic site | 17.7 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.