It opens at six in the morning and closes at eleven at night. The main building at Dōgo Onsen dates in its present form from the rebuilding of 1894, which makes it a hundred and thirty years old, and it was designated an Important Cultural Property in December 1994. Conservation work lasting about six years was completed in December 2024. The ground-floor Kami-no-yu bath is open from six until eleven, with admission from seven hundred yen for adults and three hundred and fifty for children, rising through a range of options up to private rooms.

The shopping street and the lanes spread out from the main building, and there are other public baths to visit on foot; climb the slope at the back and you come out among temples and shrines. The tram from central Matsuyama takes about twenty minutes. Everyday shops and services are all here, so this is a residential district as much as a hot spring resort, and the people in the queue at seven in the morning are mostly local.

A working public bathhouse that is also an Important Cultural Property is an unusual combination. The programme of works was arranged so that bathing could continue through the repairs, and repairing a building without turning the water off is a category of difficulty that does not arise when the building is a museum. Everything had to be scheduled around opening the doors again the following morning, for six years. What stands here is a cultural property restored on the assumption that it would go on being used every single day by people who came for a bath and not for the architecture.