Yufuin Onsen-kyo — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
湯布院温泉郷 · Oita
Yufuin Onsen-kyo (湯布院温泉郷) is a nationally designated onsen town in Oita. 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
Five spa areas in Yufu, Oita, under one name: Yufuin, Yunohira, Tsukahara, Shonai and Hasama. Yufuin and Yunohira were designated on 5 May 1959.
Yufuin lies in a basin below Mt. Yufu (1,584 m). Before the designation it was known as "back-of-Beppu" — farmland with a few inns standing about in it. Over the mountain, Beppu was already a great spa city in the middle of a building boom. Yufuin decided not to do what Beppu was doing, and went after the national designation instead. It was the second application in Kyushu.
A generation of young innkeepers then adopted a slogan: a hundred years of town-building. Live with the landscape; keep the farm views. It was the opposite of the facility-led resort development of the time.
The turn came with an earthquake in 1975. Out of the recovery came the horse-drawn carriage, the Yufuin film festival, and the beef-eating shouting contest. What the town built after the damage was not buildings but occasions for people to gather. More than four million visitors a year come now. Yufuin has the second-largest number of sources and the second-largest flow in Japan. It also has the problems of a place everyone goes at once: traffic, litter.
Yunohira dates from the Kamakura period, some 800 years ago. The stone-paved slope beside the river was laid about 300 years ago and is still walked today. Before the war it drew the second-largest number of bathers in Kyushu after Beppu, and the old rankings placed it at the top for western Japan. A fire in 1912 destroyed almost every inn and house — and within two or three years the town was busier than before.
In July 2020 the river flooded. Four members of a family who ran an inn were killed. The site of that inn now holds a new public building.
Sources: 環境省 湯布院温泉郷 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 9 cm |
| Rank | 64 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 1 of 3 in Oita |
| Against the median of 77 | -109 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 25 cm 3–28 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
1 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 湯平金湯(大湯) | 1.6 km | 88.4℃ hot | 7.4 neutral | — | — |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Yufuin Station由布院駅 | Landmark | 7.8 km |
| Yufuin Onsen由布院温泉 | Hot spring town | 8.4 km |
| Mount Yufu由布岳 | Mountain | 10.9 km |
| Kuju Mountains九重山 | Mountain | 14.8 km |
| Beppu Onsen別府温泉 | Hot spring town | 17.6 km |
| Hells of Beppu別府地獄めぐり | Hot spring town | 18 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Kuju Forest Park | 18 km | 454 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.