Yunomine Onsen Ryokan Adumaya

Yunomine Onsen lies in Hongu, Tanabe City, Wakayama Prefecture, just west of Kumano Hongu Taisha, and is regarded as one of Japan's oldest hot spring settlements, with a history said to stretch back some 1,800 years. Ryokan Adumaya has stood along the Yunotani River here since the Edo period as a traditional healing inn. The present building is a purely Japanese wooden structure raised between the early and mid-Showa era. Because annexes climb the hillside behind it, the inn appears to be two stories from the street yet is sometimes described as four. All twenty-two rooms take their names from the tree used for their alcove post, and the maki room, framed boldly in Japanese umbrella pine, is known as the room once used by members of the Imperial family.

The water comes from the inn's own source, Tamakiyu, which rises immediately beside the bathhouse. It is classified as a sulfur-bearing sodium chloride and bicarbonate spring, with a source temperature of 92.5 degrees Celsius and a pH of 7.6, making it a mildly alkaline, hypotonic, high-temperature spring. The discharge is so abundant that the inn records it as unmeasurable, and the official site states plainly that the baths are one hundred percent free-flowing Yunomine spring water. Flakes of mineral bloom drift through water carrying the scent of sulfur, and neither recirculation nor chlorination is used. Because the source exceeds ninety degrees, cold water is added in the indoor baths to bring the temperature down, but the samashiyu bath alone is filled with undiluted source water cooled naturally in the air.

The bathing rooms comprise the makiburo, built entirely of Japanese umbrella pine with two tubs of differing size and switched between men and women at midnight, a mushiburo steam bath fed by the scalding vapor of the source and said to be one of only a handful in the country, an open-air bath designed by a Kyoto University professor specializing in Japanese gardens, the undiluted samashiyu, and two family baths available free of charge. Parking for thirty cars is free, credit cards are accepted, and both bath towels and hand towels are provided. Overnight stays with two meals start at 16,500 yen per person for two sharing a room, before tax and bathing tax. Day-use bathing, formerly 730 yen for adults and 420 yen for children, remains suspended as an infection control measure.