Ninna-ji

Emperor Uda finished this temple in 888, abdicated, and moved in as a monk. For the next thousand years the head priest was an imperial prince, which made Ninna-ji a monzeki temple and gave it the buildings to match: what you walk through in the southern half is a palace, not a monastery.

The Goten is the part to pay for. Corridors on stilts connect a series of reception halls with painted sliding doors, and they look out on a garden of white sand, clipped pines and a pond, with the five-storey pagoda framed above the hedge from the veranda of the Shinden. It is one of the best-composed views in Kyoto and there is usually nobody in it.

The main hall was moved here from the imperial palace in the seventeenth century, and the Nio-mon gate at the entrance is one of the three great gates of Kyoto, though it gets a fraction of the attention paid to Nanzen-ji's.

The cherries are the reason locals come. Omuro-zakura are a dwarf variety, about two to three metres tall, so the blossom is at eye level rather than overhead, and they open in mid to late April, a week or two after everything else in the city has finished. That makes Ninna-ji the last cherry blossoms in Kyoto and the grounds charge admission during the bloom.

Otherwise the grounds are free and the Goten costs around 800 yen. Kinkaku-ji is fifteen minutes away by bus and swamped; this is the same World Heritage listing, and quiet. The Randen tram stops at Omuro-Ninnaji, right outside the gate.