Ise-Shima

Ise-Shima National Park was declared in 1946, the first created after the Second World War, and occupies the Shima peninsula, in Mie prefecture, on the Pacific. It is a park on a human scale where the protected landscape is inseparable from the activity of its inhabitants.

Its symbolic core is the Ise Grand Shrine, the most venerated in Shinto, dedicated to the sun goddess Amaterasu. The shrine is surrounded by a sacred forest that has been preserved for centuries precisely because of its religious status, with monumental cryptomerias, and its buildings are rebuilt in their entirety every twenty years following a ritual repeated for more than a thousand years and requiring sustained forest management over the very long term to obtain the timber.

The coast is a deeply indented ria coast, with Ago Bay as its main setting: a labyrinth of inlets, islands and islets whose calm waters made possible the birth of pearl culture, developed here by Mikimoto Kokichi in the late nineteenth century, and which remains the emblematic economic activity of the area. Also working in these waters are the ama, women divers who gather shellfish and seaweed on a single breath following a tradition documented for some two thousand years and today kept up by a heavily ageing community. The beaches, the cliffs and the wedded rocks of Meoto Iwa complete the park's coastline.