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Kyoto has roughly 1,600 temples. You’re only going to see a handful of them, and that’s completely fine — this isn’t a list of every temple in the city. These are the best things to do in Kyoto and what not to miss. None of these need to happen in any particular order. A few are timing-sensitive — I’ll tell you when — but otherwise, this is just the list of what’s actually worth your time.
Temple or Shrine? The Basics
You’re going to see a lot of both in Kyoto, so it’s worth sixty seconds of your time up front.
Shrines (jinja, jingu, or taisha — like Fushimi Inari Taisha) are Shinto, and belong to kami, the native spirits and gods of Japan. You’ll know one by its torii gate, the freestanding arch marking the boundary between the everyday world and sacred ground. Temples (-dera, -ji, or -in — like Kiyomizu-dera) are Buddhist, imported from China and Korea starting in the 6th century, and house statues of the Buddha or bodhisattvas rather than a kami.
You don’t need to track any of this closely to enjoy either kind of site, but it’s a useful lens as you go — it’s part of what makes exploring things to do in Kyoto so layered, since you’re often standing in two different religious traditions within the same few hundred meters.
Things to Do in Kyoto
Kiyomizu-dera Temple: When the Gates Open
Kiyomizu-dera opens at 6:00 a.m. No other major Kyoto temple comes close, and that single fact makes it the best stop of your first morning.
The great wooden stage juts out over the hillside on enormous pillars, with the whole city spread out behind it, and at dawn — mist still in the valley, almost nobody on the boards — it’s genuinely one of the great views in Japan. By ten, the approach streets are a slow-moving river of people. The temple hasn’t changed. Your experience of it has.
You actually get two views here, and most visitors only take one. Stand on the Main Stage itself for the view outward — mist, valley, city skyline. Then walk across to Okunoin, a smaller hall set on the opposite hillside, for the view back at the stage: the wooden structure jutting out on its pillars, framed by maple trees, which is the shot you’ve probably seen a hundred times without knowing where it was taken from.
The site has been sacred a lot longer than it’s been photogenic. The complex has burned down nine times over the centuries; the buildings standing today — stage included — were rebuilt in 1633 on the orders of the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, using traditional joinery and not a single nail. It’s now part of the “Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto” UNESCO World Heritage listing, and even its name is a piece of history: Kiyomizu-dera means “Pure Water Temple,” after the Otowa Waterfall running below the stage.
It’s easily one of the essential things to do in Kyoto for exactly that reason — few places let you stand on 400-year-old wood while looking at 1,250 years of continuous use.
Climb Fushimi Inari Shrine at Dawn — All the Way Up
Fushimi Inari Taisha is the mountainside shrine with thousands of vermilion torii gates tunneling up through the trees — free, open 24 hours, and mobbed from nine to five. What most people think of as “the shrine” is really just its base: the Romon Gate (donated in 1589 by Toyotomi Hideyoshi), the main hall, and the start of the Senbon Torii, the dense double row of gates everyone photographs. But the whole mountain behind it is part of the same shrine — the torii-lined trail and the small sub-shrines scattered all the way to the summit are still sacred ground, just less formal and far less crowded the higher you climb.
You’ll notice the foxes everywhere — stone kitsune guarding the gates and altars, often holding a key, a jewel, a scroll, or a sheaf of rice in their mouths. They’re not the deity themselves; they’re Inari’s messengers, sacred intermediaries between the god and everyone climbing the mountain. The objects they carry aren’t random either — the key represents access to the rice granary, the jewel symbolizes spirit and power, and the rice sheaf ties back to Inari’s original role as the god of agriculture, before the shrine’s patronage expanded to cover business and prosperity generally.
Go before seven, and keep climbing past that base complex. There’s no grand building waiting at the top — the summit, Ichinomine, is just a small subsidiary shrine in the trees, worse views than lower down. What you’re climbing for is everything in between: the crowds thinning out fast, mile after mile of smaller torii gates donated by ordinary worshippers, and Yotsutsuji, the halfway intersection (30–45 minutes up), which has the best view on the mountain and almost nobody there to share it.
Don’t want the full climb? Okusha, just past the Senbon Torii (15–20 minutes in), is a legitimate stopping point. Yotsutsuji is the real sweet spot if you want more. The summit itself (233 m, full loop ~4 km, 2–3 hours) is for completists only.
The shrine predates Kyoto itself: the Hata clan founded it in 711, decades before Kyoto became the capital in 794. It’s dedicated to Inari, deity of rice, sake, and business — hence the thousands of gates, each donated by someone whose wish came true.
The shrine’s base sits at the foot of Mount Inari in Fushimi Ward, just south of central Kyoto — five minutes by JR from Kyoto Station to Inari Station, entrance right outside the ticket gates. Go early — it’s one of the best things to do in Kyoto, but only before the crowds arrive.
Come Hungry to Nishiki Market
Nishiki Market is a narrow covered arcade running about five blocks (roughly 390 meters) through central Kyoto, with well over a hundred shops and stalls — pickles, seafood, tofu skin, knives, sweets, skewers, matcha everything. It’s four centuries old, dating to 1615, and locals still shop here, which is more than you can say for most markets that end up on lists like this.
Two practical things nobody tells you. A good chunk of stalls — usually a third or so — take Wednesday off as an informal rest day, an old midweek tradition that isn’t universal but is common enough to gut your visit if you don’t check first. And eating while walking is not okay here: it’s an actual posted rule, not just etiquette. Buy your food, then eat it standing in front of the shop you bought it from, or in that shop’s eat-in space.
Bring cash. Plenty of stalls take cards now, but a fair number of the small, family-run ones still don’t, and you don’t want to be stuck at the counter figuring that out with a line behind you.Most shops run 9:00–17:00 or 18:00. Give it a couple of hours mid-morning. Come hungry.
If you’d rather have someone guide you through it, the Nishiki Market brunch walking tour pairs seven food tastings from market vendors with a sit-down brunch afterward, in a small group. Between the food and the history, it’s easily one of the most rewarding things to do in Kyoto if you show up hungry and unhurried.
Walk Hanamikoji Street in Gion — Know the Rules Before You Go
Gion is Kyoto’s geiko (geisha) district, and its rules are genuinely enforced, not just posted for show. Read this part properly — getting it wrong here costs money and, more to the point, is rude.
Tourists are banned from entering the private alleys off Hanamikoji Street. Photography is also prohibited on those same private streets. The private roads are marked with multilingual signage. More broadly, photographing geiko or maiko without their consent anywhere is a real legal exposure under Japan’s general portrait-rights protections.
None of that is aimed at you being here. It exists because working women were being chased down alleys, followed onto private property, and grabbed for selfies by people who’d forgotten this is a neighborhood where several hundred people live and work. Treat it as somebody’s street, because it is — and that goes for the neighborhood’s architecture too, like the curved bamboo inuyarai screens along the townhouse fronts, which aren’t there to sit or lean on.
What’s still completely open: Hanamikoji itself, every marked public street, Yasaka Shrine, Tatsumi Bridge. That’s plenty. Walk it in the early evening when the lanterns come on and the wooden façades go gold, and keep your camera pointed at the architecture — one of the more quietly rewarding things to do in Kyoto if you go in respecting it as a real neighborhood, not a photo set.
Find the Shirakawa Canal — the Quiet Half of Gion
One block off Hanamikoji, and most people never make it.
The Shirakawa Canal runs shallow and clear past weeping willows and cherry trees, with old machiya townhouses backing directly onto the water and Tatsumi Bridge — a small humped wooden bridge, made famous by Memoirs of a Geisha — sitting in the middle of it. It’s the prettiest corner of Gion and reliably the calmer one, because the crowds are all a street away doing the famous walk.
It’s public, free, and always open. Come at dusk, when the lanterns come on along the water. This is the Kyoto people mean when they say they fell for Kyoto — and it’s one of the most underrated things to do in Kyoto precisely because it isn’t trying to be anything.
Watch the Lanterns Come On at Yasaka Shrine
At the eastern end of Shijo-dori, Gion runs straight into Yasaka Shrine — vermilion gates, and a dance stage hung with hundreds of lanterns, each painted with the name of a local business that paid for it. They’re lit every evening, and the effect is worth planning your walk around.
Free, open 24 hours, all year. The grounds run on into Maruyama Park, also open around the clock, where the enormous weeping cherry is floodlit in blossom season and the whole city seems to turn out to sit under it.
The short answer? Do items 4, 5, and 6 as one continuous early-evening walk. Hanamikoji, then the canal, then the shrine as the lanterns come on. It’s about ninety minutes, and it’s the best evening’s worth of things to do in Kyoto you’ll find in the city.
If you’d rather have a local guide walk you through it, the Gion Hidden Gems & Geisha Culture tour covers almost this exact route plus a couple of extra historic stops, or for something after dark specifically built around spotting geiko and maiko, there’s the Stories of Geisha night tour.
Book Gion Corner for the Traditional Arts Show
Gion Corner runs a compressed introduction to seven Japanese traditional arts in about 50 minutes — chanoyu tea preparation, koto, ikebana, bugaku court dance, kyogen comic theater, Kyomai dance performed by real maiko, and either bunraku puppetry or noh depending on the month.
Quick distinction, since it comes up constantly: a maiko is an apprentice, typically in her late teens, still training and easy to spot by her elaborate, colorful kimono and long trailing obi. Once she graduates — usually in her early 20s — she becomes a geiko, the Kyoto-dialect word for what’s known elsewhere in Japan as a geisha. Same profession, different word by region; maiko is simply the training stage of it.
Is it a sampler rather than the real thing? Yes, openly so. It’s also the only realistic way most visitors will see Kyomai danced by a maiko at all, and the Kyomai segment is the reason to go.
Two things to know before you book: the winter months run a shorter, six-art version without bunraku or noh (though you get a post-show maiko photo op instead), and the theater does close for a handful of days each year — worth a quick check on the booking page for your travel dates. You can book tickets directly through Klook.
This is one of the more structured things to do in Kyoto if you want a taste of several traditional arts in one sitting rather than chasing each one down separately.
Eat Your Way Down Pontocho — But Get the Timing Right
Pontocho is a single lantern-lit alley running parallel to the Kamo River, barely wide enough for two people, lined with wooden restaurants, tea houses, and izakaya stacked several stories high.
There’s a 45-minute window that makes or breaks it: roughly 17:45 to 18:30. Before that, the lanterns haven’t got their glow against the daylight. After it, the dinner crowd fills the lane and you’re shuffling. In between, you get lantern light against a twilight sky and enough room to actually look up.
Then eat — options here range from casual riverside noodle counters to kaiseki houses that need booking weeks out — and from May through September, the places on the river side extend kawadoko platforms out over the water, which is the single most pleasant of the things to do in Kyoto after dark.
Walk the Philosopher’s Path to Ginkaku-ji
A 2 km canal-side path under hundreds of cherry trees, named for a philosopher who walked it daily on his way to the university. It’s free, always open, and in early April it’s one of the most beautiful walks in Japan — and one of the busiest.
Do it in the other direction to everyone else. Most people start at Ginkaku-ji and walk south; start at Nanzen-ji instead and walk north, and you’ll spend the whole path facing oncoming crowds rather than stuck behind them.
At the northern end sits Ginkaku-ji, the Silver Pavilion — which was never actually silvered, and is better for it. The moss garden and the raked sand cone are the real attraction. Wandering this path and finishing at the pavilion is one of the essential things to do in Kyoto if you want scenery without a ticket line.
Get to Arashiyama Before Eight
The Arashiyama Bamboo Grove is a 400-meter path through bamboo so dense the light goes green. It’s free and open 24 hours, and at midday it is genuinely unpleasant — a slow-moving column of people, phones up, nobody able to hear the thing that makes it special, which is the creaking and clacking the stalks make in wind.
Be there between 07:00 and 08:00 on a weekday. That’s the entire trick. At that hour it does the thing it’s famous for.
While you’re there, two more stops. Nonomiya Shrine sits just off the grove path — small, mossy, and historically where imperial princesses purified themselves for a year before going to serve at Ise. And Tenryu-ji, a UNESCO site and the foremost of Kyoto’s five great Zen temples, whose Sogenchi garden is the best thing in Arashiyama and, frankly, better than the grove.
Day Trips From Kyoto
Two or three days covers the city itself, but if you’ve got more time, these are the three day trips locals actually recommend — each reachable by train or bus in under an hour, and each different enough from central Kyoto to feel like its own trip rather than more of the same.
Nara: The Original Capital and 1,200 Bowing Deer
Nara was Japan’s first permanent capital, from 710 to 784, before the court moved to Kyoto. Todai-ji houses the Great Buddha — a 15-meter bronze statue inside what’s still the largest wooden building in the world — and just outside, Nara Park is home to roughly 1,200 sika deer, considered sacred messengers of the Shinto gods since the 8th century.
They’ve learned to bow for the rice crackers sold throughout the park, which is either the most charming or most mercenary animal encounter in Japan, depending on your mood that day. Kasuga Taisha, with its thousands of stone and bronze lanterns, rounds out a full day. It’s an easy answer to “what else is there to do besides the usual things to do in Kyoto” — Nara is a genuinely different city with its own 1,300-year head start.
Uji: Byodo-in and the Birthplace of Matcha
Seventeen to twenty minutes from Kyoto Station on the JR Nara Line, then a ten-minute walk, Uji is small enough to see properly in half a day. Byodo-in’s Phoenix Hall is famous enough to be on the back of the ¥10 coin — bring one and compare, it’s a genuine match — and the attached Hosokan Museum holds the original phoenix statues that once sat on its roof.
Uji has also been Japan’s center of green tea production since the medieval period, and its main street is lined with matcha shops selling everything from ceremonial-grade leaves to matcha soft-serve. If Kyoto gave you the temples, Uji gives you the tea culture behind half the souvenirs you’ve already bought.
Osaka: Worth More Than a Day
Osaka is the fastest “day trip” on this list to reach — about 13–15 minutes by Shinkansen to Shin-Osaka, or roughly 29 minutes door-to-door on the plain JR rapid train from Kyoto Station to Osaka Station, closer than some Kyoto neighborhoods are to each other. And that’s exactly the problem with treating it as a day trip: it’s not a town, it’s a full city with its own identity, and a few hours barely scratches it.
Osaka has been Japan’s merchant hub for centuries and still calls itself “the nation’s kitchen,” with a food culture so intense the locals coined kuidaore — roughly “eat until you go broke” — to describe it. Dotonbori’s canal-side neon and street food, Kuromon Ichiba Market, and Osaka Castle are the obvious stops, but the real draw is the after-dark energy: Osaka’s nightlife and izakaya culture run later and looser than Kyoto’s, which is a quieter, more temple-and-tradition kind of city by comparison.
If your schedule allows it, this is the one stop on this list worth reshuffling your itinerary for: spend a night or two in Osaka rather than squeezing it into a single afternoon from Kyoto. If you genuinely can’t spare the extra night, it’s still doable as a day trip — just go in knowing you’re seeing the highlight reel, not the city.
Final Thoughts
Here’s the thing about the best things to do in Kyoto: none of them are secret. The gates, the gold pavilion, the bamboo, the lanterns coming on over the canal — it’s all right there, signposted, on every list, exactly as advertised. What Kyoto asks of you is that you show up at the right hour.
Set the alarm for 5:30 a.m. once or twice. Walk into the bamboo before the buses arrive, or stand on the Kiyomizu-dera stage at six with the mist still sitting in the valley. That’s the version of this city that gets under your skin — and it’s available to absolutely anyone willing to lose an hour of sleep for it.
