Places to visit in Sri Lanka
The eight our tours keep coming back to, and what we have learned about each one — when to go, how long it takes, and what is actually worth your morning.
Cultural Triangle
Sigiriya
A granite column rising two hundred metres out of flat jungle, with the ruins of a fifth-century royal citadel on the summit.
On 7 of our tours
Hill country, Uva
Ella
A small town in a gap in the mountains, a thousand metres up, at the end of the most photographed train line in Asia.
On 7 of our tours
Central hills
Kandy
The last capital of the Sinhalese kings, wrapped around a lake in the hills, and home to Buddhism's most venerated relic.
On 7 of our tours
Southern coast
Galle
A walled Dutch trading town on a headland, still lived in, and the best-preserved colonial fortification in Asia.
On 7 of our tours
Southern and Uva provinces
Yala National Park
Scrub, lagoons and granite outcrops on the south-east coast, holding one of the densest leopard populations anywhere in the world.
On 5 of our tours
Hill country, Central
Nuwara Eliya
Tea estates, cottage gardens and colonial hotels at nineteen hundred metres, where the British came to escape the heat and it still gets genuinely cold at night.
On 7 of our tours
Southern coast
Mirissa
A crescent of sand and a working fishing harbour on the south coast, and the departure point for some of the most reliable blue whale watching in the world.
On 5 of our tours
Cultural Triangle
Anuradhapura
The island's first capital for over a thousand years, and still a living pilgrimage city built around a tree grown from a cutting of the Buddha's own.
On 4 of our tours
Not sure which of these to build a trip around?
Tell us how long you have and what you want to see, and we will put a route together. Most of our travellers end up with something that is not quite any of the listed itineraries.