Nunobiki Herb Gardens

A ropeway leaves from beside Shin-Kobe station, climbs for ten minutes over the rooftops, and puts you on a hillside 400 metres above the city with about 200 species of herbs planted down the slope. It is the largest herb garden in Japan, laid out in terraces with German-styled buildings, a glasshouse, a restaurant and a footbath fed by warm water, and the whole thing is designed to be walked downhill from the top station.

The plants are the stated attraction and the view is the real one. Kobe sits in a narrow strip between the mountains and the sea, so from here the entire city is visible at once, the port beyond it, and Osaka Bay past that. After dark the ropeway runs late in summer and the view becomes one of the three great night views of Japan by local reckoning.

Skip the ropeway on the way down and take the walking path instead. It passes the Nunobiki waterfall, four falls in a wooded gorge that were being written about in the tenth-century Tales of Ise, and the Nunobiki dam, a stone-faced structure from 1900 that was the first Western-style concrete gravity dam built in Japan and is now an Important Cultural Property. The walk down to Shin-Kobe takes about forty minutes and is entirely in the trees, which is startling given that you are inside a city of 1.5 million.

A return ropeway ticket is around 1,800 yen and includes garden entry. Shin-Kobe is a Shinkansen stop, so this works as a two-hour stop between trains.