Things to Do in Kyoto

Kyoto’s four most-searched sights, Kiyomizu-dera’s wooden stage, Fushimi Inari’s torii tunnel, Kinkaku-ji’s gold reflection, and Arashiyama’s bamboo grove, are covered in full in the Kyoto neighbourhood and day-trip guide and the Japan activities guide. This guide starts where those leave off: temples that draw a fraction of Kiyomizu-dera’s crowds, a river gorge you raft through by boat, a 300-year-old tea shop, workshops where broken ceramics get repaired with gold instead of thrown out, and a museum built inside a former Nintendo factory. Two days covers the famous circuit comfortably; budget at least one more for what’s in this guide. For every other destination’s activity guide, see all activities guides.

Zen Temples Beyond Kyoto’s Crowds

Nanzen-ji, at the northern end of the Philosopher’s Path, is one of Japan’s most important Zen temples and gets far less pressure at its gates than Kinkaku-ji or Kiyomizu-dera. Its Hojo Garden is a classic karesansui dry-landscape design, but the temple’s genuine oddity is a redbrick Meiji-era aqueduct, the Suirokaku, that runs directly through the temple grounds, built in the 1890s to carry water and hydroelectric power from Lake Biwa into the city. Walking under its arches is one of the few places in Kyoto where a 19th-century engineering project and a centuries-old temple share the same few metres of ground.

• Otagi Nenbutsu-ji. A quiet temple in the Sagano hills above Arashiyama, home to around 1,200 stone rakan (Buddhist disciple) statues, each carved by an ordinary visitor under a resident monk’s guidance during a restoration project in the 1980s. No two faces match, and several hold beer cans, sunglasses, or other props their carver chose. Almost no tour groups make the uphill walk from the main Arashiyama sights.
• Jojakko-ji. A hillside temple a short walk past the Arashiyama bamboo grove, built into a slope thick with maple trees. The climb to its small pagoda rewards with a view over the Sagano rooftops that most bamboo-grove visitors never see, since the temple sits just off the main path.
• Kodai-ji. Founded in 1606 by the widow of a major feudal lord, with a bamboo grove of its own and gardens lit for evening illuminations during spring and autumn. Quieter than Arashiyama’s grove and walkable from Gion in around 10 minutes.

Heian Shrine and Kyoto’s City Parks

Heian Shrine was built in 1895 to mark the 1,100th anniversary of Kyoto’s founding as the capital, a replica at five-eighths scale of the original Heian-era Imperial Palace. Its vermillion torii gate at the entrance to the approach is among the largest in Japan, tall enough to be a landmark from well outside the shrine grounds. The garden behind the main hall, added later, is one of Kyoto’s better cherry blossom spots without Maruyama Park’s crowds.

Maruyama Park, next to Yasaka Shrine at the edge of Gion, centres on a single weeping cherry tree lit at night during blossom season, the traditional gathering point for the city’s hanami parties. Kyoto Botanical Gardens, in the north of the city near Kitayama Station, is one of Japan’s oldest public botanical gardens and includes a large glass conservatory, a rose garden, and a stand of trees old enough to predate the gardens themselves. Both are free or nearly free to enter and give a version of Kyoto that has nothing to do with temples.

Hozugawa River Boat Ride and Sagano Train, Kyoto

The Hozugawa River carves a gorge through the hills west of Arashiyama, and two ways of experiencing it connect into a natural half-day loop. The Sagano Romantic Train (Torokko Ressha) is an open-sided sightseeing train that runs along the top of the gorge between Torokko Saga Station, near Arashiyama, and Kameoka, taking around 25 minutes at a walking pace past the river below, from around ¥880 (~USD 6) one way. From Kameoka, boatmen pole and paddle wooden boats back down the same gorge to Arashiyama, a two-hour ride through rapids and calm stretches, from around ¥4,100 (~USD 27) per adult; prices vary by season and operator, so check current fares before booking. Doing the train one way and the boat back is the standard route, and neither needs advance planning beyond arriving early in peak season.

Nishiki Market and Kyoto Station’s Food Halls

Nishiki Market runs five blocks through Downtown Kyoto under a covered arcade, close to 130 shops deep, most of them small family businesses that have sold the same thing for generations: pickled vegetables, fresh tofu, skewered seafood, knives, and prepared food meant to be eaten walking. It gets crowded fast once tour buses arrive mid-morning; before 10am it still functions closer to a working market than a food tour. Most stalls sell single skewers or small portions specifically for eating on the move, though eating while walking through the narrower sections is generally discouraged, better to step to the side.

Kyoto Station itself is worth treating as a food destination rather than just a transit hub. The Cube and Porta underground malls beneath the station concourse hold ramen specialists, a dedicated Kyoto ramen alley (Kyoto Ramen Koji) on the 10th floor gathering eight or so regional styles under one roof, and gyukatsu (breaded, seared beef cutlet) counters that have become one of Kyoto’s most searched food trends in recent years. It’s a practical stop before a train or after a long day of temples, with far more range than the station-food reputation suggests.

Tea Ceremony, Matcha Workshops and Ippodo in Kyoto

Kyoto is where Japanese tea culture is most formally practised, and the experiences here go beyond drinking a cup of matcha. Several temples and dedicated tea houses in Higashiyama run seated tea ceremony sessions for visitors, from a 30 to 45 minute introduction explaining the etiquette and gestures to a fuller multi-course chakai. Matcha-whisking workshops, aimed more at hands-on participation than formal ritual, run in smaller studios around Downtown and typically finish with the visitor’s own bowl to take home.

Ippodo Tea, founded in 1717 near the old Imperial Palace, is one of the oldest continuously operating tea shops in the city and still sells matcha, sencha, and hojicha by weight from the same Teramachi-dori storefront. Its attached tasting room, Kaboku, serves each tea properly prepared rather than as a cafe-style drink, a useful stop for anyone who wants to taste the difference between grades before buying. For the source of the region’s tea itself, the Uji day trip in the Kyoto destination guide goes into the growing region in full.

Hands-On Culture in Kyoto: Kintsugi, Knife Forging and Shibori

Kyoto’s craft workshops let visitors make something rather than just watch a demonstration, and most run in small studio settings that take walk-ins or same-week bookings outside peak season.

• Kintsugi. The practice of repairing broken ceramics with lacquer dusted in gold, treating the crack as part of the object’s history rather than a flaw to hide. Workshop versions use a simplified resin process finished in an afternoon, working on a piece the studio provides or one you bring.
• Knife forging. A handful of Kyoto smiths run short forging or knife-sharpening sessions, working a blank into a finished single-bevel blade under supervision. Sessions run several hours and end with a knife the visitor made, a different souvenir than buying one off a shelf.
• Shibori dyeing. Kyoto is one of the traditional centres of shibori, a resist-dyeing technique using thousands of tiny hand-tied knots to create patterns, distinct from the batik or tie-dye techniques it’s sometimes compared to. Workshop sessions dye a scarf or small piece of fabric, with the tying and unwrapping split across the class.

Geiko and Maiko Performances in Kyoto: Miyako Odori and Gion Corner

The Kyoto destination guide covers the etiquette around photographing geiko and maiko in Gion’s private streets. The more reliable way to see the culture is a ticketed performance, and Kyoto runs several through the year rather than one generic show.

Miyako Odori is Gion Kobu’s spring dance performance, staged since 1872 and traditionally the most elaborate of Kyoto’s geisha-district dances, with a full company of geiko and maiko performing choreographed pieces on a purpose-built stage. Kyo Odori, staged by the Miyagawacho district, and Gion Odori, staged by Gion Higashi in November, run on different calendars and draw smaller crowds than Miyako Odori without a noticeably different standard of performance. Exact dates shift year to year; check each district’s own listings before planning a trip around one.

Gion Corner, in the Yasaka Hall building, runs a shorter nightly show aimed at visitors, compressing tea ceremony, koto music, kyomai dance, bunraku puppetry, and gagaku court music into about an hour. It’s a reasonable option outside the spring and autumn dance seasons, or for travellers who want a broader sample of traditional arts in one sitting rather than a single geisha dance performance.

Pontocho and Kamo Riverside Nightlife in Kyoto

Pontocho is a single narrow alley running between the Kamo River and Kiyamachi Street, lined end to end with restaurants and bars stacked several storeys high, many with no English signage and a handful genuinely difficult to find without a reservation. From May through September, many of the restaurants backing onto the river open yuka, wooden platforms built out over the water, for dinner above the Kamo’s current, the same idea as the kawadoko platforms at Kibune covered in the destination guide’s day trips, but inside the city rather than a mountain village.

The Kamo River itself is a nightlife spot in its own right without spending anything: couples and small groups sit along the banks between Sanjo and Shijo bridges through the evening, spaced out along the water at oddly even intervals, a local habit visitors notice long before anyone explains it. A handful of speakeasy-style cocktail bars, unmarked from the street and found mostly by word of mouth or a hotel concierge’s recommendation, have opened around Pontocho and Kiyamachi in recent years, a quieter counterpoint to the izakaya scene covered in the Japan food guide.

Modern Kyoto: Manga Museum, Aquarium, TeamLab and the Nintendo Museum

Kyoto’s reputation runs almost entirely on its historic side, which makes its handful of modern attractions easy to miss even though two of them are recent enough that most guidebooks don’t cover them yet.

• Kyoto International Manga Museum. Housed in a converted 1929 elementary school building near Karasuma-Oike Station, holding around 300,000 manga volumes across every genre and era, several thousand shelved in English. Visitors can pull almost anything off the open shelves and read in the building or on the surrounding lawn.
• Kyoto Aquarium. An inland aquarium near Kyoto Station and Umekoji Park, unusual for a city with no coastline of its own, built around treated water rather than a direct seawater source. Its best-known resident is the Japanese giant salamander, a species largely unique to rivers in this part of Japan, alongside a dolphin show and a walk-through jellyfish tunnel.
• teamLab Biovortex Kyoto. Opened in October 2025 a short walk from Kyoto Station’s Hachijo East exit, and already the largest teamLab exhibition space in Japan at over 10,000 square metres across four floors. More than 50 large-scale digital installations respond to visitors’ movement in real time, extending the same immersive-art format teamLab built its reputation on in Tokyo and Singapore. Tickets are timed-entry and sell by the day, from around ¥3,800 (~USD 25).
• Nintendo Museum. Opened in 2024 in Uji, inside a former Nintendo factory that once produced the company’s original playing cards. The exhibits trace Nintendo’s full product history, from Hanafuda cards through to recent consoles, with large-scale playable recreations of classic controllers and games on the top floor. Tickets are sold only through a lottery on Nintendo’s own booking site, entered months ahead of a travel date; there is no walk-in or same-day access, and it is one of the hardest reservations to get in Japan right now.

Nishijin Textiles and Shopping in Kyoto

Nishijin, in the northwest of the city, has woven textiles since before Kyoto was even the capital, and gave its name to Nishijin-ori, an elaborate brocade weaving technique historically used for the obi sashes worn with formal kimono. The Nishijin Textile Center runs live loom demonstrations and kimono fashion shows through the day, free to watch, alongside a shop selling scarves, obi, and small woven goods at a wide range of price points. It’s the easiest way to see the technique up close without commissioning a full obi, which can run into the thousands of dollars from an established weaver.

Downtown, the covered Teramachi and Shinkyogoku arcades run parallel to each other a block from Nishiki Market, mixing souvenir shops, stationery stores, and Buddhist religious goods sellers that have operated in the same arcades for generations. For Kyoto-style ceramics, Kiyomizu-yaki, the pottery studios and shops around the Gojozaka slope below Kiyomizu-dera sell everything from everyday tableware to signed pieces from named potters. General tax-free shopping mechanics and what to buy across Japan more broadly are covered in the Japan shopping guide.

Cycling Kyoto’s Kamo River and Takase Canal

Central Kyoto is flatter than its hillside temples suggest, and a paved path runs along both banks of the Kamo River for most of its length through the city, popular with runners, cyclists, and anyone wanting a break from stone steps. Rental shops near Kyoto Station and Downtown rent bikes by the day from around ¥1,000 (~USD 7), and the flat river path makes Kyoto one of the easier Japanese cities to see partly by bike rather than entirely on foot or by bus.

The Takase Canal, a narrower waterway parallel to the Kamo through Downtown, was dug in the early 1600s to move goods by boat and today runs past Kiyamachi’s restaurants and bars, cherry trees lining much of its length. Following it on foot or by bike from Nijo down to Gojo covers a quieter, mostly residential stretch of the city between two of the destination guide’s busier neighbourhoods, Downtown and Southern Higashiyama.