Engaru Onsen Hokkaido

Engaru Onsen Hokkaido is a thermal bathing facility in Engaru Town in the Okhotsk Subprefecture of northeastern Hokkaido, a community most celebrated throughout Japan for Takinoue Park (Shibazakura no Oka), a hillside of over 100,000 square meters blanketed in brilliant pink moss phlox (shibazakura) that creates one of the most spectacularly photogenic spring flower displays in the Japanese archipelago each May when the hillside erupts into a solid carpet of vivid pink blooms visible for kilometers across the flat Okhotsk plain below. The shibazakura carpet of Takinoue, planted over decades of cultivation effort by the local community, has become one of Hokkaido's most distinctive seasonal tourism attractions and a symbol of the community's determination to create beauty from the wide open agricultural landscape of northeastern Hokkaido through horticultural achievement. The sodium-bicarbonate thermal spring waters of Engaru provide relaxation in a Okhotsk region community whose extraordinary seasonal flower spectacle, dairy farming culture, and proximity to the Daisetsuzan volcanic highland combine to create an unexpectedly rich natural and agricultural tourism destination in one of Hokkaido's most spacious and least-visited subprefectural regions.