Nachi Falls

Nachi Falls lies in the forested hills above the coast of southern Wakayama, in the town of Nachikatsuura. The Nachi River pours over a cliff of hard volcanic rock in a single drop of 133 metres, the tallest uninterrupted fall in Japan, and is one of the three great waterfalls of Japan with Kegon and Fukuroda.

It is the first and largest of the 48 falls of the Nachi mountains, and has been worshipped since ancient times as a kami. The Hirō Shrine at its foot has no main hall: the waterfall itself is the object of worship. Together with Kumano Nachi Taisha and the Buddhist temple Seiganto-ji on the slope above, it forms one of the three grand shrines of Kumano, the goal of the Kumano pilgrimage.

The view of the falls behind the vermilion three-storey pagoda of Seiganto-ji is one of the most familiar images of sacred Japan. The falls, shrine, temple and primeval forest are components of the World Heritage site 'Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range', inscribed in 2004.

The Nachi area is built of granite porphyry and related rocks formed some 14 million years ago during intense volcanic activity that created a large caldera in the Kumano region. These resistant rocks form the cliff over which the falls drop. The area receives very high rainfall from the Pacific, feeding the falls and the dense warm-temperate forest around them.

Protected as sacred ground, the forest around the falls is one of the best-preserved warm-temperate evergreen forests in Japan, with evergreen oaks, camellias and giant cedars. The humid spray zone supports ferns and mosses on the cliffs.

Nachi was a centre of Shugendō, and ascetics practised under its falls; the monk-poet Kazan, a retired emperor, is said to have undertaken a thousand-day retreat here in the 10th century. The Kamakura-period 'Nachi Waterfall' hanging scroll in the Nezu Museum, a National Treasure, depicts the falls as a deity. The Nachi Fire Festival on 14 July, when twelve portable shrines representing the falls meet giant torches on the stair below, is an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property.