The central area of Takayama City is called "Old Town" and is also known as "Hida's Little Kyoto" due to its well-preserved castle town and merchant town, including restaurants and souvenir stores converted from machiya (traditional houses dating back to the Edo period.) The tourist guide lists this spot as "Hida Takayama," and hordes of people visit from all over Japan every year. It has been awarded 3 stars as a must-see tourist destination in France's Michelin practical travel guide "Voyager Pratique Japon."

Drinking water flows beneath the low-slung traditional wooden facades, sake breweries hang "sake-bayashi" (a ball made of Japanese Cedar branches) at their doors, and the streets are lined with doors of traditional wooden townhouses and noren curtains of long-established shops. Chidori lattice, a traditional technique unique to Takayama, is made by cutting multiple grooves evenly into a single square-shaped piece of wood to form the latticework, then putting the pieces together like a puzzle. This secret technique of Hida's Local Artisans adds to the charm of Sanmachi Street.

Takayama City has been the central city of Hida since times of old, and merged with nine neighboring towns and villages in 2005 as part of a large-scale municipal restructuring. With an area of 2177.61 square kilometers, Takayama City is larger than Osaka and Kagawa prefectures and almost equal to the entire Tokyo metropolis, making it the largest city in Japan. After the merger, Takayama City crosses the Hida region from east to west, bordering Nagano and Toyama prefectures in the east and Ishikawa and Fukui prefectures in the west, stretching approximately 81 km from east to west and 55 km from north to south. The Hida Mountains rise to the east of the city and the Ryohaku Mountains to the west, and the central city is located in the Takayama Basin surrounded by steep mountains.
Designated as an International Conference and Tourist City, Takayama is a popular tourist destination with its traditional townscape, numerous ski resorts and hot springs, and the number of tourists from the Chukyo and Kansai regions, and more recently from the Tokyo metropolitan area and abroad, has been increasing every year.

In Takayama City, a large percentage of the city's harvest is highland vegetables such as Hida tomatoes and spinach, which take advantage of the cool climate prevalent in the region. The area is also famous for its specialty vegetables, such as Yususo pumpkins, Akishima sage, Hida single thick leeks, and Hida red turnips. At the Miyagawa morning market, the fresh vegetables are grown with great care by the local 'grandmothers' who sell them. Thick and crooked cucumbers, lively leaves, taut daikon radishes and carrots with mud still clinging to them, bright red turnips, apples, tomatoes, etc., are all on display, and it is impressive to see vegetables in their natural state; something you would never come across in urban supermarkets.