Luminari Club
By Marta Diaz · 04 Jul 2026 · 7 min read
The famous week in late November, the one in every guidebook, is real. It is also the week Kyoto holds four million extra visitors, and the week the city's best hotels quietly wish you had come earlier.
The maples turn from the mountains down. Go north to Kurama and Kibune in the second week of November and you will have colour, silence and a riverside lunch that does not require a reservation made in August.
The calendar the temples keep is written in altitude, not dates.
By the first week of December the crowds have flown home and the southern temples are only just reaching their peak. The city exhales. This is when the ryokan owners themselves go to look at leaves.
Written by Marta Diaz · CEO & Editor-in-Chief
Avid tennis player, photographer and traveller. She curates every hotel in the collection and writes The Edit.
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