7 Places To Visit In Furano

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Filter (7)
Garden & Park (2)
Day Trip (2)
Factories & Industries (1)
Village (1)

1. Farm Tomita

9 km from city center

Garden & Park

Twelve fields of lavender and mixed flowers on a hillside in Nakafurano, free to enter and open all year. Timing matters more here than anywhere else in Furano: the lavender is harvested at the end of July, so the peak runs roughly 5 to 25 July, and guides that say July to August send people to look at cut stubble. Outside those three weeks the poppy, salvia and cosmos beds carry the colour.

Top Attraction

28 km from city center

Day Trip

Thirty minutes north by train and, for a lot of visitors, the better half of the trip. Shirogane Blue Pond holds its cobalt colour from aluminium in the water, with dead larch trunks still standing in it. Shirahige Falls feeds the same stream, Shikisai-no-oka runs flower terraces up the hills, and Patchwork Road links the lone trees that appear on Japanese calendars. A rental car or a bicycle beat (Read More)s the bus timetable.

Top Attraction

3 km from city center

Skiing

Two linked zones, Furano and Kitanomine, with around 900m of vertical and the dry inland snow Hokkaido is skied for. Out of season the ropeway carries walkers up Mount Kitanomine for the view over the whole basin, but the summer operating window is short and moves year to year, so confirm the dates before building a day around it.

8 km from city center

Garden & Park

A town-run lavender slope that costs nothing to enter and has a chairlift running up the side of it. The lift is what separates it from Farm Tomita: you get the view back down across the purple rows and out over the Furano basin instead of walking between them at ground level. Same bloom window, a fraction of the coaches.

3 km from city center

Village

Fifteen log cabins strung along raised boardwalks through the forest behind the New Furano Prince Hotel, each one a craft workshop selling glass, leather, wood or paper. Entry is free and the cabins open from the afternoon onward. It is at its best after dark in winter, when the walkways are lit and the snow sits deep on the roofs.

2 km from city center

Factories & Industries

Free to enter, with a viewing window onto the production line, a pizza kitchen and an ice cream counter that runs lavender and pumpkin alongside plain milk. Booked workshops let you make butter, cheese, bread or ice cream yourself. This is the stop that holds up in rain and through the long off season, when the flower fields have nothing to show.

7. Day Trip to Asahiyama Zoo

48 km from city center

Day Trip

The most visited zoo in Japan, roughly two hours away via Asahikawa, built around enclosures that show behaviour rather than staged shows. Penguins swim overhead through a glass tunnel and a domed capsule puts you at eye level inside the polar bear pool. Between December and March the keepers walk the king penguins along a cleared path through the grounds, which is what makes winter the time to go (Read More).