Yoshino-Kumano National Park

The Yoshino-Kumano National Park, situated on the Kii Peninsula, which reaches out into the Pacific from western central Honshu, takes in the mountains of the Yoshino region and the deep gorges of Kumano region. Many of the temple and shrines once visited by swarms of pilgrims can still be seen. During the Nara period this territory, then remote and inaccessible, was the haunt of the mountain ascetics of the Shugendo sect.

The isolated northwestern section of the National Park consists of the Yoshino Mountains, which rise above the little town of Yoshino. The mountains are widely famed for their cherry trees - some 100,00 in all, in four large groves which are in blossom at varying times, depending on the altitude, between the