Ehime Hidden Gems

Ehime faces the Inland Sea along a long, sunny coastline and grows citrus on nearly every south-facing slope of it — the prefecture leads the country in several varieties, and the terraced groves above Yawatahama are stone-walled and steep enough that growers use monorails to move the crop. Matsuyama, the largest city on Shikoku, has an original castle on a hill in the middle of it, reached by ropeway or a climb, and Dogo Onsen at its foot, which appears in the eighth-century chronicles and is plausibly the oldest hot spring in continuous use in Japan; the 1894 bathhouse building is the one Soseki wrote about. The prefecture also anchors the Shimanami Kaido at Imabari, and the Uwakai coast in the southwest is a ria shoreline of pearl rafts and fish farms with almost no through traffic. Uchiko, inland, kept a merchant street and a working Taisho-era theatre built on the money that Japanese wax once earned there.