Gōra Park Tropical Greenhouses (箱根強羅公園 熱帯植物館)

Gōra Park opened in 1914, at a time when the Gōra district of Hakone had been developing since the Meiji era as a summer resort and villa area for the Tokyo region. It was first intended as a place of leisure and social gathering for a wealthy clientele, notably members of the nobility. During the Second World War the Japanese-style section of the garden was transferred to the religious organisation Sekai Kyūseikyō and survives today as the Shinsenkyō garden; the rest became a fee-paying public park in 1957. It is now run by Odakyu Hakone.

The display greenhouses opened in 1979. The main one, today's tropical house, first opened as a 'tropical rhododendron house'; according to a park manager quoted by the Kanagawa Shimbun in January 2026, the aim at the time was to gather tropical plants that were still rare in Japan. Recognition of the site followed: the Hakuundō tea pavilion was registered as a tangible cultural property in 2001, and the park itself as a registered monument of landscape gardening in 2013.

The garden covers about 24,500 m² of hillside alongside the Hakone cable car. When it was registered in 2013, its composition was judged distinctive for a layout ordered along a clear axis and for its use of many large boulders drawn from the local geology of Gōra; a fountain marks its centre.

The greenhouses, grouped near the main gate and Kōen-shimo station, comprise four buildings: three display houses and one hall used for events. The largest, the tropical house, covers about 440 m², and inside it a waterfall drops from a large rock between banks of dense planting. The tropical herb house is arranged around a marble fountain that the park describes as medieval Italian work, while admitting that no document confirms it. In the bougainvillea house the plants are trained into arches over the path. None of the sources consulted names the architect or the builder.

The tropical house shows many rare plants on either side of its waterfall; a traveller's tree rises all the way to the roof. The greenhouses also show tropical fruit trees, among them mango and guava. The tropical herb house, which the park presents as the first display greenhouse in Japan devoted to the subject, brings together plants used for spice and scent: vanilla, cinnamon, curry leaf and cardamom.

The bougainvillea house forms arches of pink and purple flowers. Near its entrance stands a bonsai-trained specimen estimated to be 160 years old, which the park calls the oldest bougainvillea in Japan; some trunks here reach about 30 cm in diameter, a size the park says cannot be seen elsewhere on the main islands of the archipelago.

The main gate is a minute's walk from Kōen-shimo station on the Hakone cable car, and the west gate lies near Kōen-kami station; Gōra station is about five minutes away. The greenhouses, close to the main gate, offer a warm refuge on cool mountain days. A visit combines well with the Hakuundō tea pavilion, where tea is served, with the Craft House and its pottery and glass-blowing workshops, and with the garden's rose garden and seasonal flower beds.