Anan Onsen Tokushima

Anan Onsen Tokushima is a coastal hot spring facility in Anan City on the Pacific coast of Tokushima Prefecture, a stretch of southern Shikoku coastline renowned for the Ohama Beach loggerhead sea turtle nesting site, one of Japan's most important marine turtle conservation areas where female loggerhead turtles return each summer to lay their eggs in the same beach where they themselves hatched, in a nesting tradition that has been carefully monitored and protected by local conservation volunteers in collaboration with national marine protection programs since the 1980s. The Anan coastline of sea cliffs, tidal rock pools, and sandy beaches backed by subtropical coastal vegetation provides one of Shikoku's wildest and most naturally scenic Pacific shorelines, while the nearby fishing port of Mugi maintains the traditional tuna and bonito fishing culture of the Kii Channel that has sustained Tokushima's coastal communities for centuries in one of the richest Pacific fishing grounds in western Japan. The chloride thermal spring waters here warm visitors to a Pacific coast community where the annual drama of sea turtles returning to their birth beach, the dramatic cliff and cove scenery of the Muroto-Anan Quasi-National Park, and the working fishing port culture of the Shikoku coast create an authentic and biologically significant natural environment for thermal wellness by the Japanese Pacific.