Kumano Hongu, Journey's End in the Kii Mountains

For more than a thousand years, retired emperors, monks and ordinary villagers walked into these mountains along the Kumano Kodo, and the destination was here. Kumano Hongu Taisha is the head shrine of some three thousand Kumano shrines across Japan, a set of unpainted cypress halls with thick cypress-bark roofs standing at the top of a long flight of stone steps, austere where other Japanese shrines are red and gold. Its messenger is the yatagarasu, the three-legged crow that guided Japan's first emperor through this same wilderness, and you will see it on every banner and every stamp in a pilgrim's book.

The shrine has not always stood on the hill. Until a catastrophic flood in 1889 it sat on Oyunohara, the great sandbank where two rivers meet below, and that site is still the spiritual heart of the place: an empty gravel clearing among trees, approached through the largest torii gate in the world, nearly 34 metres of black steel that you see from far down the valley. Walking the last stage from Hosshinmon-oji, about three hours through cedar plantation, tea fields and hamlets, and coming out above that gate is one of the great arrivals in travel — a feeling Spanish walkers recognise instantly, which is why Kumano and the Camino de Santiago share a dual-pilgrim credential.

The reward afterwards is water. Yunomine Onsen, ten minutes away in a steep ravine, has been in use for around 1,800 years; its tiny riverside Tsuboyu hut is the only bathhouse on the UNESCO World Heritage list you can actually bathe in, booked half an hour at a time, and villagers still cook eggs in the source. At Kawayu you dig your own pool in the gravel of a warm river, and in midwinter the town dams it into an enormous open-air bath. Slow, green, deeply old Japan.