History
Wakayamashi Station opened on 21 March 1903 as a joint Nankai Railway and Kiwa Railway terminus. After Kiwa Railway was transferred to Kansai Railway in 1904 and nationalised in 1907, the station served both Nankai and the government railway. Successive corporate changes—Kintetsu absorption in 1944, the 1947 spin-off that re-established Nankai Electric Railway—did not interrupt joint operations with JNR, later JR West. A station-building department store, the Nankai Wakayama Building, opened in May 1973 with Takashimaya as anchor tenant; that store closed in 2014. Between 2015 and 2021 the building was rebuilt in two phases. On 15 July 2017 the Nankai and JR ticket gates were separated, ending the long-running shared-fare arrangement and bringing ICOCA acceptance to the JR side.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
It is one of only two stations naming a prefectural capital city outright with the suffix "-shi" ("city"), the other being Iyo Railway's Matsuyamashi.