Most trips through Japan showcase the country through its cities and national symbols—the temples of Kyoto, the skyscrapers of Tokyo, its gardens, and its cuisine. This itinerary is different: it delves deep into the country’s spiritual geography, to the very places that Japanese emperors, monks, and peasants have walked for centuries—and it does so not as an outside observer, but through that very same physical experience: a multi-day hike along mountain trails, overnight stays in villages without a single store, and an encounter with the sea after several days in the mountains.

We have deliberately combined Koyasan, Kumano Kodo, and Ise—three sacred sites scattered across the Kii Peninsula but united by a millennia-old network of pilgrimage trails—and add to this the rare opportunity to become a “double pilgrim” by walking a trail officially twinned with Spain’s Camino de Santiago.

Pilgrimage is perhaps the oldest form of travel of all: long before traveling the world became a form of recreation or a pursuit of curiosity, it was an act of trust and a quest for change. People set out not to see something, but to change something within themselves—to purify themselves, to heal, to leave their old life behind, and to return home as a different person. In this sense, the journey is not a means to an end, but the end itself: every step, every kilometer traveled, is already part of a prayer, and the body’s fatigue is the price paid for clarity of spirit. This is precisely the difference between a tourist and a pilgrim: a tourist collects places; a pilgrim changes within.

The cultural and ethnographic value of the Kumano Kodo lies in its authentic religious syncretism: the pilgrimage route was conceived as a fusion of Shinto veneration of the spirits dwelling in the mountains, cliffs, and waterfalls with Buddhist teachings, and it united these two traditions so closely that people of that era saw no contradiction between them.
The three great shrines of Kumano—Hongu Taisha, Hayatama Taisha, and Nati Taisha, collectively known as Kumano Sanzan—were revered as the earthly embodiment of the Buddhist Pure Land, a place pilgrims could reach while still alive. The journey there was symbolically interpreted as a trip to the world of the dead and back—Kumano was called the “mountain of rebirth,” and the trail itself, according to legend, led through death to a new birth. At the same time, unlike many sacred sites in Japan (including the neighboring male monastic complex of Koyasan), Kumano was historically open to everyone—nobles and commoners, men and women alike—which was a rarity in medieval Japan and makes this pilgrimage a monument to the country’s social history as well.

The Kumano Kodo, a network of ancient trails in the mountains of the Kii Peninsula in southern Japan, is one of the few routes in the world where the pilgrimage tradition has not been interrupted or turned into a museum exhibit, but continues to thrive. The name translates simply as “the old roads of Kumano,” but behind this modest phrase lies more than a thousand years of unbroken history. As early as the 9th century, during the Heian period, Japanese emperors began making pilgrimages to the three great shrines of Kumano—and by the 11th–12th centuries, the flow of pilgrims, ranging from abdicated emperors to peasants, had become so dense that contemporaries called it the “pilgrimage of the ants to Kumano”: the streams of people stretching along the mountain trails were unstoppable. Alongside this massive, almost democratic movement, another, far more austere tradition developed here—Shugendō, the syncretic path of the mountain ascetics known as yamabushi, which combined pre-Buddhist worship of mountain spirits with esoteric Buddhism: it was believed that by crossing dangerous mountain passes, one could attain supernatural spiritual power.
During the Meiji era, when the government forcibly separated Shinto and Buddhism, banned Shugendō, and subsequently demolished thousands of temples as part of a policy to consolidate shrines, the Kumano trails began to be overgrown by the forest—pilgrims started reaching the shrines by train and car, and the walking routes became almost forgotten forest paths for decades. The revival did not begin until the 1990s, and in 2004, the Kumano Kodo was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site—becoming only the second walking pilgrimage route in the world to receive this status after Spain’s Camino de Santiago (Camino de Santiago), with which the Kumano Kodo has been officially twinned since 1998. Today, travelers who have walked both trails are awarded the honorary title of “Dual Pilgrim”—and our itinerary, which combines the Kumano Kodo with visits to Koyasan and Ise, offers a rare opportunity to experience three of the pinnacles of Japan’s spiritual geography in a single journey.

Physically, the Kumano Kodo trail alternates between challenges and moments of respite. Steep ascents through cedar and Japanese cedar forests—where some trees may be several hundred years old—give way to descents into quiet mountain valleys with rice terraces and hamlets consisting of just a few houses.
The fog that often lingers in these mountains in the mornings gives the trail that very sense of being an “island on the mainland” that medieval pilgrims wrote about—Kumano was historically a remote enclave, cut off from the rest of Honshu by mountains, and this isolation has fueled local mysticism for centuries.
Along the trail, like milestones of prayer, stand the oji—small Shinto shrines that were once officially numbered (tradition counts them up to ninety-nine), at each of which one was supposed to stop and pray; today, at the main ones, you can get a stamp in your pilgrimage booklet—a practice that physically connects the modern traveler to a thousand-year-old tradition.
Walking here is not a physical exercise, but a form of meditation in motion: by the evening of the fourth day in the mountains, the pilgrims perceive the fatigue in their legs not as a hardship to be endured, but as part of the very experience of purification that is the reason they came here in the first place.