Giō-ji

photo by Yanajin33 · CC BY-SA 3.0

You can walk round the garden in under five minutes: it is moss, and nothing else.

You walk in, and the whole garden is already there: a carpet of moss under the maples and a room open onto the greenery. The full circuit takes under five minutes. If you expect a garden to tour, you leave disappointed; if you know it is five minutes of moss, you do not.

A small temple of nuns at the far end of Sagano, a sub-temple of Daikaku-ji. It is named after Giō, the dancer who in the *Heike monogatari* (the medieval tale of the fall of the Taira family) is cast off by Taira no Kiyomori and becomes a nun here.

ℹ️ ¥500 adults, ¥100 up to high school; admission from 9:00 to 16:30, and you can stay until 16:50. ⚠️ The combined ticket with Daikaku-ji is given as ¥1,000 on the Giō-ji page and ¥600 on the Daikaku-ji one: two official pages, two prices. ⚠️ It is not accessible to people with reduced mobility. It has three parking spaces in all. From JR Saga-Arashiyama Station or the Randen station it is twenty-five minutes on foot; by bus 28 from Kyoto Station, about fifty minutes plus seventeen on foot; by bus 91, fifteen on foot.

🚉 Torokko Arashiyama Station · 12 min walk

Sources: giouji.or.jp · giouji.or.jp

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