Kumano Nachi Taisha

The waterfall came first. Nachi Falls drops 133 metres in a single unbroken column, the tallest single drop in Japan, and it was worshipped as a deity long before any building stood here. The shrine at its base, Hirou, has no hall at all: the object of worship is the water itself, visible through the torii.

Uphill from it, Kumano Nachi Taisha is one of the three grand shrines of Kumano, and next door stands Seiganto-ji, a Buddhist temple with a vermilion three-storey pagoda. Shrine and temple sharing a hillside is not a compromise but the original arrangement, and Kumano kept it after the Meiji government forced most of Japan to separate the two. The photograph everyone takes, pagoda in the foreground and waterfall behind, is a picture of that combination.

Pilgrims have walked here for over a thousand years along the Kumano Kodo, a network of mountain routes listed by UNESCO in 2004 as one of only two pilgrimage roads in the world to hold that status, the other being the Camino de Santiago. The final approach, Daimonzaka, is 267 moss-covered stone steps climbing between cedars several hundred years old, and then another 473 to the shrine gate. It takes half an hour and is the right way to arrive.

The shrine's messenger is the yatagarasu, a three-legged crow that guided the first emperor through these mountains, and which now appears on the badge of the Japanese national football team.

Buses run from Kii-Katsuura station in about thirty minutes. Entry to the shrine is free; the pagoda observation deck and the falls each cost a few hundred yen.