Things to do in Nagasaki

Landmark · Urakami valley, north of the centre

The Peace Statue and the fountain above, and below them the hypocentre marked by a black pillar, with a surviving section of Urakami Cathedral's wall moved beside it.

Local tip: Go to the Atomic Bomb Museum first, then walk down to the Hypocentre Park and up to the Peace Park last — the sequence matters and takes about three hours. The museum is direct and unsparing. The city holds its ceremony on 9 August with a minute's silence at 11:02; the days around it are quieter and the lanterns floated on the Urakami river in the evening are the part residents attend. The one-legged torii at Sannō Shrine, a short walk away, is worth the detour and almost always empty.

Culture · Central, beside the Nakashima river mouth

The fan-shaped artificial island that was the Dutch trading post from 1636 to 1859 and Japan's only sanctioned window on Europe for two centuries, now substantially reconstructed building by building.

Local tip: It is landlocked now — the harbour was filled in around it — which is disorienting until you see the model inside. Allow ninety minutes and read the warehouses in order; the reconstruction is unusually careful and the miniature of the original island is the thing that makes the rest legible. Combine it with the Chinese quarter across the road, because the two together are the whole explanation of why this city eats and looks the way it does.

Landmark · Minamiyamate, on the southern slope

Japan's oldest surviving church, completed in 1864 and designated a National Treasure, with the hillside of nineteenth-century Western merchant houses immediately above it.

Local tip: Ōura is where, in 1865, a group of villagers revealed to a French priest that hidden Christian communities had survived two and a half centuries of prohibition — the event the 2018 UNESCO inscription of the region's hidden Christian sites is built around. Take the outdoor escalators up through Glover Garden and walk back down; the view over the harbour from the top terrace is the best in the city that does not require a ropeway.

Food · Central, beside Dejima

One of Japan's three historic Chinatowns, four short streets of restaurants and shops behind ceremonial gates, and the birthplace of champon.

Local tip: Champon was invented here in the 1890s at Shikairō for Chinese students who needed something cheap and filling — the shop still exists, up the hill, and has a small noodle museum in it. Inside the quarter, order sara-udon at least once: same broth, fried crisp noodles, and the local move is to put Worcestershire sauce on it. At Chinese New Year the whole district and the central squares are hung with thousands of lanterns for a fortnight.

Nature · West of the harbour, ropeway from Fuchi Shrine

A 333-metre peak directly above the harbour, reached by ropeway, with an observation deck that takes in the whole bowl of the city and the water in the middle of it.

Local tip: Go about forty minutes before sunset and stay for the transition — the shape of Nagasaki, a city poured into a valley, only makes sense from here. The ropeway is the easy way; the walk up from Fuchi Shrine takes an hour and is a decent introduction to what 'slope land' means in this city. Free shuttle buses run from several central hotels in the evening.

Neighborhood · Southern slope, above Ōura

Stone-paved lanes climbing the hillside between wooden Western houses built for the foreign settlement, most of them still lived in rather than preserved.

Local tip: This is the quiet counterpart to Glover Garden thirty metres away and almost nobody walks it. Several of the houses are open free as small museums; the rest are ordinary homes, so keep to the lane. Walk up in the morning, cut across to the Confucian Shrine, and come down through Ōura — an hour, no tickets, and the best sense of the settlement-era city you will get anywhere.