Naramachi (literally "Nara Town") is the former merchant district of Nara, where several traditional residential buildings and warehouses are preserved and open to the public.
Boutiques, shops, cafes, restaurants and a few museums now line the district's narrow lanes.
Many of Naramachi's buildings in the Edo Period and earlier were machiya, long, narrow "townhouses" that served both as shops and as the living quarters of the local merchants.
The store fronts of machiya were often kept narrow in order to save on taxes, which used to be calculated on a property's street access rather than its total area.
Today, a handful of machiya have been preserved and made open to the public as museums.