History
Kii-Katsuura Station opened on 4 December 1912 as Katsuura Station, the southern terminus of the privately operated Shingu Railway in what is now Nachikatsuura, Wakayama Prefecture. When the line was nationalised on 1 July 1934 it took its present name to distinguish it from Katsuura Station in Chiba. The station joined the Kisei West Line in 1940 and the through Kisei Main Line when that opened in July 1959. The original wooden building was replaced by the present two-storey concrete structure in 1977, and JR West inherited the station at the 1 April 1987 privatisation of JNR. Today it is the southern terminus of JR Central's Nanki from Nagoya and a stop on JR West's Kuroshio from Shin-Osaka.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Where the English and Japanese sources differ, this account follows the Japanese source.
Notes
The footbridge inside the station was redecorated in November 2004 to evoke the shrine architecture of Nachi Taisha, marking the UNESCO World Heritage listing of "Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range," for which Kii-Katsuura is a principal railhead.