Dambulla
Five cave chambers carved into a granite massif contain 153 Buddha statues and 2,100 square metres of painted murals spanning 22 centuries of continuous Buddhist artistic practice. The oldest paintings date from the 1st century BCE, the most recent from the 18th century, creating a layered visual record extraordinary in both quantity and quality. The […]
Kandy
Sri Lanka’s last independent kingdom and still its cultural capital, Kandy sits in a valley of green hills around a man-made lake created by the final Kandyan king in 1807. The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic is the most sacred Buddhist site in the country, and the puja ceremonies conducted three times daily fill […]
Polonnaruwa
Sri Lanka’s medieval capital at its peak of artistic achievement, Polonnaruwa produced monuments of extraordinary elegance before the kingdom fell in the 13th century. The Gal Vihara rock sculptures, four figures carved from a single granite face, are among the finest Buddhist artworks in Asia. The Vatadage circular relic house is one of the most […]
Anuradhapura
For over a thousand years, Anuradhapura was one of the most powerful Buddhist civilisations in Asia, a hydraulic city that fed millions through a network of reservoirs still in use today. The sacred Sri Maha Bodhi tree, grown from a cutting of the original Bodhi tree and tended without interruption since 288 BCE, is the […]
Sigiriya
A 5th-century royal palace and fortress built on the sheer face of a 200-metre volcanic rock, Sigiriya is the single most dramatic human achievement in Sri Lanka’s long history. Ancient hydraulic water gardens, vivid frescoes painted halfway up the rock face, and a summit plateau with palace ruins and 360-degree views across the flat forest […]