The harbour and the hot spring are joined by one road. Yunotsu was the port from which the silver of Iwami Ginzan was shipped, and along the single road running inland from the water stand inns and public bathhouses. The wooden bathhouses are still in use — not preserved, not reconstructed, but open in the evenings — so the buildings for bathing sit in the street as municipal equipment rather than as attractions.

Yunotsu was designated an Important Preservation District in July 2004, and the designation covers the port and the hot spring together as one district, which is the right way round: they were never separate things here. Ōta's town centre is about thirty minutes away by car. The population is in the hundreds, and the work is inns and fishing. The baths were used by the people moving silver, who needed somewhere to rest at the end of the haul, so the harbour and the spring were two pieces of equipment belonging to the same operation from the beginning.

Hot spring towns are usually in the mountains, at the end of a road, and the bathing is the reason anyone goes. Yunotsu is on the coast because the bathing was not the destination. It was what you did while waiting for a boat, which puts the sequence the other way around from almost everywhere else. The ships stopped coming a long time ago and the water kept arriving at the same temperature it always had, indifferent to the change. The thing that was once the interval — what you did while waiting — has become the centre of the town, and everything else here is now arranged around it.