Hitachi Seaside Park

On the Pacific coast of Ibaraki, an hour or so northeast of Tokyo, Hitachi Seaside Park is one of Japan's great flower destinations – a vast 350-hectare expanse of open hills, woodland, and dune by the sea, best known for painting itself a different colour with every season. It opened in 1991 and has grown into one of the most photographed parks in the country.

The signature sight is Miharashi Hill. In mid-spring it erupts into a haze of blue as some 5.3 million baby-blue-eyes (nemophila) flower across the whole slope, blurring the line between hill, sky, and sea into a single wash of colour – the image that has made the park famous worldwide. The same hill turns again in autumn, when tens of thousands of kochia – round, fluffy green mounds through summer – blaze scarlet in mid-October.

But the flowers run all year. Spring opens with a "flower relay": a million daffodils, then a quarter-million tulips among windmills and egg-shaped sculptures, then the nemophila. Early summer brings poppies and roses, high summer sunflowers and zinnias, autumn cosmos, and winter its cold-hardy "ice tulips" and a giant zodiac ground-design that changes with each new year.

There's far more here than flowers. The park's Pleasure Garden is a full amusement area, anchored by a Ferris wheel that lifts riders 100 metres for views out over the coast, alongside a roller coaster and other rides. Elsewhere there are woodland athletic courses, a disc-golf course, barbecue grounds among the pines near the sea, cycling paths, and broad lawns for picnicking. It's genuinely a whole-day place, and how you spend it is up to you.

Because the grounds are so large, a Seaside Train loops the park on a circuit of about 40 minutes, an easy way to get between the far-flung areas – useful when the hill you want is at the opposite end from where you came in.