Kyoto's Bamboo Forest and Ancient Temples: Japan's Spiritual Heart

Kyoto served as Japan's imperial capital from 794 to 1869, and the city that emerged from those 1,075 years of cultural accumulation is unlike anywhere else in Japan — a place where the traditional arts of tea ceremony, ikebana flower arranging, and Noh theatre are still practised with the same seriousness as they were in the Heian period, and where the geisha districts of Gion and Pontocho maintain a culture that has survived the modernisation that transformed the rest of Japan.

The Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, on the western edge of the city, is one of Japan's most photographed landscapes — a path through a forest of towering bamboo that creates a tunnel of green light and a sound, when the wind moves through the stalks, unlike anything else in nature. The grove is at its most atmospheric in the early morning, before the crowds arrive, and the surrounding area — the Tenryu-ji temple garden, the Togetsukyo bridge, the monkey park on the hillside — rewards a full day's exploration.

The Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine, south of the city centre, is one of the most extraordinary religious sites in Japan — a mountain covered in thousands of vermilion torii gates donated by businesses and individuals over centuries, forming tunnels of red that wind up through the forest to the summit. The full hike to the top takes about two hours and passes through a landscape of smaller shrines, stone foxes, and views over Kyoto that most visitors, who turn back at the first ridge, never see.

The Philosopher's Path — the Tetsugaku no Michi — is a two-kilometre canal-side walk between the Nanzen-ji and Ginkaku-ji temples, lined with cherry trees that make it one of Japan's most famous hanami (flower viewing) spots in spring. The path takes its name from the philosopher Nishida Kitaro, who is said to have walked it daily, and the combination of the canal, the temples visible through the trees, and the quiet residential streets alongside it makes it the finest walk in Kyoto.

The Kinkaku-ji — the Golden Pavilion — is Kyoto's most visited sight and one of the most recognisable buildings in Japan: a three-storey Zen temple covered in gold leaf, reflected in a mirror pond, surrounded by a garden of extraordinary refinement. It is genuinely beautiful, and the crowds that gather around the pond are a testament to that beauty rather than a diminishment of it. The best time to visit is on a weekday morning in the shoulder season.

Kyoto's kaiseki cuisine — the multi-course formal meal that is the highest expression of Japanese cooking — is the finest in Japan, and the city's restaurants range from the three-Michelin-starred establishments of Kikunoi and Mizai to the tofu restaurants of the Nanzen-ji temple district that serve shojin ryori (Buddhist vegetarian cuisine) of extraordinary delicacy. Nishiki Market, the covered food market in the city centre, is the best place to eat your way through Kyoto's culinary traditions in a single afternoon.

The best time to visit Kyoto is in spring (late March to early April, for the cherry blossoms) or autumn (mid-November, for the maple leaves) — both seasons transform the city's temple gardens into landscapes of extraordinary beauty. Both seasons are also the most crowded, and accommodation must be booked months in advance. The summer months are hot and humid but offer the Gion Matsuri festival in July — one of Japan's greatest festivals, with a procession of enormous floats through the city centre.