Okinawa World

Okinawa World is a theme park in Nanjo, in the south of Okinawa Island, built around Gyokusendo Cave. Above ground it has a recreated old town with craft workshops, a stage for Okinawan performing arts, a snake museum and a tropical fruit orchard.

Gyokusendo Cave

Okinawa has more than 600 limestone caves, and Gyokusendo is the largest of them. It formed over about 300,000 years and runs for 5 km, with more than a million stalactites; 890 m of it is open to visitors. An underground river flows through it. Animals adapted to the dark live inside, among them bats, eyeless harvestmen and freshwater eels that grow over 1.5 m long.

Ryukyu Kingdom Castle Town

The castle town recreates a street of the Ryukyu Kingdom era, with red-tiled houses behind Okinawan dry-stone walls. Several of the houses are over 100 years old and are Registered Tangible Cultural Properties. Workshops in the town make Ryukyu glass, pottery, woven cloth and bingata, a brightly coloured Okinawan stencil-dyed cloth with about 500 years of history. Visitors can try these crafts, indigo dyeing and more, or walk the town in Ryukyu court dress.

Super Eisa Show

Eisa is the drum dance that sends the ancestors' spirits off on the last day of the Okinawan Bon festival. The park's show is a staged version of it, played with lion dance, Yaeyama angama and other Okinawan arts, and ends with kachashi, a dance the audience joins.

Habu Museum Park

The Habu Museum Park grew out of a research facility set up more than 40 years ago to cut the number of habu bites. It keeps three kinds of habu, Okinawa's venomous pit viper, along with sea snakes, mongooses and coconut crabs, and has an exhibition on the snake. A habu and mongoose show is held several times a day.

Tropical fruit orchard

The orchard grows about 450 trees of some 50 kinds of tropical fruit, from mango, papaya and passion fruit to dragon fruit, star fruit, lychee and jabuticaba.