Less than 200 metres separate the Hypocenter Monument and the Atomic Bomb Dome. That figure comes from our own route measurement, and it explains why Hiroshima makes such sense on foot: the memorial section of this walk is packed so tightly that you can cover it in half an hour — and it costs nothing.
Free outdoors: the memorial stops sit close together
Seven of the twelve stops on this route lie in and around the Peace Memorial Park, each a few hundred metres from the next. There you see the Atomic Bomb Dome from outside, the modest stone marker at the hypocenter, the Cenotaph with its Flame of Peace, the Children's Peace Monument heaped with cranes, and the National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. The park itself is public, and so are the riverbanks, bridges and avenues along it. The grounds around Hiroshima Castle — the moats and stone walls — are yours to look at from outside too.
Honest: where you do pay
Anything indoors costs money. Expect admission at Shukkeien Garden, the seventeenth-century strolling garden that condenses mountains, valleys and lakes into a miniature landscape. The same goes for the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum and the Hiroshima Museum of Art with its French Impressionists, for the 'Hiroshima Hills' observation deck in the Orizuru Tower, and for the Peace Memorial Museum. The buildings and their surroundings are free to take in; stepping inside is not.
The walk itself is free
The twelve-stop route is free to play. You open it in your browser, with no download and no account, read the story at each place and answer a question whose answer is somewhere around you.
Practical details
Roughly 5.1 kilometres, two to two and a half hours, longest stretch between two stops about 850 metres. You can begin anywhere on the route and walk at your own pace. A phone is all you need.
