Iya Onsen Hotel Kazurabashi

A 22-room Iya Valley inn where a little wooden cable car you start yourself climbs to open-air baths over the mountain hamlets, with irori-side local dinners, a singing okami and a free bonnet-bus tour to the lit-up vine bridge — but the onsen is recirculated and the hilltop baths can get crowded

Hotel Kazurabashi is a hotel in name only: a 22-room inn on a slope of the Iya Valley, one of Japan's 'three great hidden regions', about five minutes' drive from the vine bridge it is named after. Its signature is a small hut-like cable car — guests press the start button themselves — that climbs from a third-floor courtyard to the Tenkū open-air baths, built of local blue Awa stone and looking across to hamlets clinging to the mountainside, with a foot bath and a thatched rest house with a sunken hearth. The water is a simple sulphur spring, but one leading booking site lists it as recirculated and filtered. Japanese guests rate it 4.68 across 990 reviews on one major site and 4.9 across 26 on another, with service the top score on both (4.76 and 4.9). Bloggers from 2022 to 2026 and 2025–2026 reviewers praise the staff, the dinners round an irori hearth — dekomawashi skewers, ayu, soba-grain porridge and Iya soba — the okami singing a local folk song at dinner, rooms refitted from 2021, and the free 20:00 night tour in a vintage bonnet bus to the illuminated bridge. The complaints, also recent: in 2026 the hearth-warmed skewers arrived lukewarm, a 2026 blogger found the open-air bath packed with groups ignoring bath etiquette, the cable car's bell can be heard from some rooms until 23:00, and an October 2026 guest was kept awake by noise from the floor above. Rooms book up, and two-meal stays run about ¥20,000–30,000 per person.