Nagasaki Unzen Onsen Fukuya

Nagasaki Unzen Onsen Fukuya is located in the Unzen resort town on the Shimabara Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture, within Japan's first-ever National Park (designated 1934), centred on the dramatic Unzen volcanic massif whose billowing fumaroles and boiling mud pools — the infamous jigoku or 'hells' of Unzen — create one of Japan's most otherworldly volcanic landscapes. The intensely sulphurous thermal waters of Unzen, saturated with hydrogen sulphide from highly active fumarolic venting, have a sobering historical connection to the 17th-century persecution of Japanese Christians, when martyrs were tortured in the springs — a dimension of tragedy embedded in this beautiful volcanic resort's past. Fukuya's traditional inn brings together centuries of Unzen's onsen culture with the dramatic natural theatre of the Shimabara Peninsula's still-active volcano, which famously generated devastating pyroclastic flows in 1991.