Son Tra Peninsula and Lady Buddha 2026: The Three Routes That Reopened, and What a Car May Drive

The mountain above Đà Nẵng was closed for most of three years and a lot of people still do not know it came back. Heavy rain in October 2022 tore landslides across the inland roads of bán đảo Sơn Trà, the routes were suspended for repair, and they stayed suspended until 16 September 2025. What reopened was not the free-for-all that existed before. It reopened as a managed area with three named routes, a seasonal closing time, and a list of vehicles that may not go up.

For a driver that list is the whole story, because of what is on it and what is not.

Which routes are open on Sơn Trà, and what may drive them?

Three, and they are not interchangeable.

Yết Kiêu to đỉnh Bàn Cờ to Bãi Bắc. This is the climb, and it runs one-way. Prohibited on it are bicycles, automatic scooters and cars over 24 seats. An ordinary car or a small van is not on that list, which makes a private car one of the few things that can still legally take you over the top of the peninsula. The one-way rule also decides the shape of your afternoon: you go up from the Yết Kiêu side near the port, cross đỉnh Bàn Cờ, and come down the far side to Bãi Bắc, arriving back on the coastal Hoàng Sa road. You do not get to turn around and retrace. Plan it as a loop or you will plan it wrong.

Tiên Sa to Suối Ôm to đỉnh Bàn Cờ. Bicycles, manual-gearbox motorbikes and people on foot. No cars.

The Hoàng Sa junction near the Bãi Bắc turn to the heritage banyan. Walking only. The cây đa di sản at the end of it was recognised as a Vietnam Heritage Tree in June 2014 at an estimated 800 years, standing 22 metres with a trunk about 10 metres around and 26 aerial roots holding it up. Your driver waits at the junction; the tree is yours on foot.

The ban on automatic scooters is the rule visitors argue with most, and it is the one worth respecting. Sections of this climb exceed 15 percent gradient with hairpins stacked back to back. An automatic gives a rider almost nothing in the way of engine braking, and the accidents on Sơn Trà have always been descent accidents, not ascent ones. Riders who turn up on a scooter leave it at the transfer point near the Hoàng Sa and Lê Đức Thọ junction and continue by shuttle. In a car, in low gear, none of this is dramatic — but it is a road we take at well under 30 km/h on the way down, and passengers who get carsick should sit in front.

What time does the peninsula actually close?

March to the end of September, 07:30 to 18:30. October to the end of February, 07:30 to 17:30.

Today that longer window is still in force, and it disappears on 1 October. This is the single most useful date in this article. The reason people drive up Sơn Trà in the late afternoon is the light — the city laid out below with the Hàn river bridges catching the last of it — and from October that light arrives after the gate time. For the rest of August and through September, an afternoon departure works. From 1 October it becomes a midday and early-afternoon trip, and anyone promising you sunset from đỉnh Bàn Cờ in November is promising something the schedule does not allow.

The other suspension is weather. When a dangerous-weather warning is issued, visiting stops. From late September onward that is a live possibility rather than a formality, and it is why we treat Sơn Trà as the flexible half of a day rather than its anchor in the wet months. Overnight camping and open fires are prohibited outright, and night patrols drawn from the ward authorities, police and the Sơn Trà – Ngũ Hành Sơn forest rangers enforce it.

Is Lady Buddha inside the controlled zone?

No, and this trips people up. Chùa Linh Ứng at Bãi Bụt sits on the coastal road below the mountain routes, keeps its own hours of roughly 06:00 to 21:00, and charges nothing to enter or to park. You can visit the pagoda on a day when the mountain above it is shut for weather.

It is worth the stop on its own terms. Built from 2004 and consecrated in 2010 across some 20 hectares, it holds a 67-metre standing figure of Quan Thế Âm on a lotus base 35 metres across, the work of the sculptors Thụy Lam and Châu Viết Thạnh, with seventeen storeys and twenty-one Buddha statues inside. The figure faces the sea, one hand in a mudra and the other holding a water vessel — it was raised as a blessing for the fishing fleet, and the fishermen of Đà Nẵng still read it that way. It is a working pagoda. Shoulders and knees covered, and the courtyard in front of the statue is quieter before about 09:00 than at any other hour.

How long is the drive from Hội An?

About 35 km to chùa Linh Ứng, and 50 to 60 minutes door to door along the coast — longer if we hit the school-run hour through Đà Nẵng. From Đà Nẵng airport it is about 25 to 30 minutes. From the middle of Đà Nẵng, nearer 20.

Add the climb and the loop on top of that. Up from Yết Kiêu, time at đỉnh Bàn Cờ at a little over 700 metres where the Đế Thích statue sits at his stone chessboard, then down to Bãi Bắc and back along the coast to the pagoda: budget two and a half to three hours on the peninsula itself if you want it to feel like anything other than a photo raid. Six hours from Hội An and back is a comfortable half-day; four is rushed.

When should you leave, and what does the driver do?

Two departures work, and they are different trips.

Leave Hội An around 06:00 and you get the langurs. Sơn Trà holds the largest known population of the red-shanked douc langur — voọc chà vá chân nâu, the one Vietnamese conservationists call the queen of primates — put at roughly 1,335 animals in 237 groups by a GreenViet survey. They feed early. The sighting, when it comes, happens from a stopped car with the engine off, or from standing still: no flash, no calling out, no feeding, and no getting close to the macaques by the roadside, which are a different animal with a different temperament. Your driver knows which pull-outs on the Yết Kiêu climb are worth stopping at and which are just wide corners.

Leave around 14:00 in the March-to-September window and you get the view instead, with the gate time as your limit rather than the light.

Either way this is a stop-and-go road rather than a drop-off. The car goes where you go, which is the practical argument for driving it: on a peninsula where scooters are banned from the climb and coaches cannot fit the hairpins, a car is the vehicle the rules were written around.

Does Sơn Trà fit an airport day?

It fits better than almost anything else in Đà Nẵng, because it is on the right side of the city. Marble Mountains — Ngũ Hành Sơn — sits about 25 to 30 minutes south of the pagoda and roughly half an hour north of Hội An, so a departure day can run Hội An to Sơn Trà in the morning, back down to Marble Mountains, then the airport with bags already in the car.

What we would not do is put the mountain loop on a day with a fixed check-in. The gate hours, the one-way descent and a weather suspension you cannot predict are three things you do not want between you and a flight. Pagoda on a departure day, yes. Đỉnh Bàn Cờ on a departure day, only with a late-evening flight and slack in the plan.

If you want this one driven — the early loop for the langurs, or the afternoon one for the view — tell us the day at hoiandriver.com/quote. A real driver prices it, 10% books it, and the balance is settled at trip end.