14 Places To Visit In Takamatsu

Show on map

Filter (14)
Day Trip (4)
Museum (2)
Island (2)
Commercial Street (1)

1. Ritsurin Garden

1 km from city center

Garden & Park

Seventy-five hectares begun in 1625 and finished 120 years later, with six ponds, thirteen landscaped hills and around a thousand pines pruned by hand, set against the wooded slope of Mount Shiun. It is not counted among the three great gardens of Japan and it is widely held to be better than all of them. Give it two hours rather than one, and take the flat-bottomed boat across the South Pond if i (Read More)t is running.

Top Attraction

14 km from city center

Day Trip

A former industrial island in the Inland Sea turned over to contemporary art, with Tadao Ando's Chichu Art Museum sunk into the hillside, Benesse House above the beach and Kusama's yellow pumpkin on the jetty. The direct ferry takes 50 to 60 minutes. Book Chichu ahead with a timed slot; bags and cameras go in lockers. The Naoshima New Museum of Art opened in May 2025 and is in almost no guidebook.

Top Attraction

6 km from city center

Viewpoint

A flat-topped lava plateau standing 292 metres over the eastern edge of the city, with cliff-edge lookouts across the Inland Sea and its islands. This was the battlefield where the Taira were broken in 1185, and the place names on the plateau still refer to that day. The Skyway road up is free to drive and parking is 300 yen. Best in the last hour of light.

1 km from city center

Forts & Palaces

One of only a handful of Japanese castles built on the sea, with moats fed directly by the tide and sea bream swimming in them that visitors can feed. The keep was pulled down in the Meiji period, so what you see is its restored stone base, completed in 2013, two original turrets and the Hiunkaku hall. It is two minutes from the station, 300 yen, and in summer it opens at 05:30.

5 km from city center

Museum

An open-air museum at the foot of Yashima holding traditional buildings moved here from across Shikoku: thatched farmhouses, a sugar press, a fishing hut, a village kabuki stage and a vine suspension bridge of the kind otherwise found only deep in the Iya Valley. Admission has risen sharply to 1,600 yen, well above the 1,000 most guides still print. Closed Tuesdays.

28 km from city center

Day Trip

Kotohira-gu, the shrine of seafarers and the most visited in Shikoku, sits 785 stone steps above the town, with another 583 to the inner shrine for anyone still going. About an hour away by train. Two things guides get wrong: the shuttle bus that covers roughly half the climb requires an advance reservation, and the palanquin carry service ended in January 2020 and is not coming back.

7. Megijima

6 km from city center

Island

Twenty minutes and 370 yen by ferry, this is the island the Momotaro folk tale calls Onigashima, and a long artificial cave near the summit has been fitted out with ogre figures to match. Above it is an observation deck over the whole bay. Of the near islands this is the shortest, simplest trip, which makes it the one to pick if you only have a few hours. Ferries run roughly every two hours.

9 km from city center

Island

Forty minutes out, a village of wooden houses stacked up a steep slope on lanes too narrow for cars, with a stone lighthouse at the far end and about a dozen permanent Setouchi Triennale works scattered among the buildings. Where Megijima is a quick novelty, Ogijima is the one you wander, and cats outnumber residents. There is no schedule to keep beyond the ferry back.

6 km from city center

Museum

The sculptor's Mure studio, stone circle and hillside left as they stood when he died in 1988, holding around 150 works, many deliberately unfinished. Access is tightly controlled and the rules have changed: 3,300 yen, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays only, at fixed entry times, booked online at least 24 hours ahead. The postcard reservation method that older guides describe no longer exists.

5 km from city center

Buddhist Temple

The 84th temple of the Shikoku pilgrimage, sitting on top of the Yashima plateau among old pines, with white-robed pilgrims arriving all day. Its treasure hall holds armour, weapons and relics recovered from the Gempei battlefield below, for 500 yen; the grounds themselves are free. You are already up here for the view, and this is what else is up here.

26 km from city center

Day Trip

The largest island in this part of the Inland Sea, about an hour by ferry, and the one with enough on it to fill a whole day: the Kankakei gorge and its ropeway, Angel Road, a sandbar that surfaces twice a day and lets you walk to the next island, olive groves planted in 1908 and a soy sauce village still using wooden barrels. Rent a car or plan around the bus timetable.

16 km from city center

Day Trip

Thirty-five minutes by ferry to an island whose art museum is a single white concrete shell with two openings to the sky and no exhibits at all: water seeps from the floor and beads across it all day. People sit on the floor in silence. It pairs with Naoshima but it is not a lesser version of it, and it is the more unusual of the two. Do not confuse it with Teshima Yokoo House, a separate ticket o (Read More)n the same island.

0 km from city center

Commercial Street

Two and a half kilometres of covered arcade running through the centre, claimed as the longest network in Japan, with Marugamemachi at its smart end and older, scruffier stretches beyond. Rain never matters here. The reason to walk it rather than skip it is Lion-dori and the lanes off it, where the sanuki udon shops are, and where you should eat before leaving the prefecture.

1 km from city center

Waterfront

The redeveloped waterfront beside the station, with a symbol tower whose upper floor gives a free view over the harbour and out to the islands, a red glass lighthouse on the breakwater that lights at night, and the ferry terminal itself. Every island on this list leaves from here, so you will pass through it anyway. Go up the tower before you sail rather than after.