Saikoro Hot Spring Nagasaki Unzen

Saikoro Hot Spring in Unzen, Nagasaki prefecture, draws strongly sulfurous geothermal waters from Japan's first designated national park (1934) — the Unzen-Amakusa National Park, whose cloud-wreathed Unzen volcanic highland has produced Japan's most dramatic modern volcanic disaster (the 1991 pyroclastic flow that killed 43 people including French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft) and Japan's most historically significant Christian martyrdom site. The Unzen jigoku — steaming sulfurous vents that produced the boiling water torture chambers where hundreds of Japanese Christians were martyred during the 1620s Shimabara persecutions — surrounds the spa with a landscape where geothermal energy has served simultaneously as natural wonder and historical instrument of religious persecution. The Obama and Shimabara coastal communities below, with their extraordinary seafood and the dramatic Chijiwa Bay scenery, complement Saikoro's highland sulfurous experience with the full Nagasaki volcanic Peninsula's environmental and historical richness.