Introduction
At around one thousand nine hundred metres, this district is where Sri Lanka stops behaving tropically. Nights need a blanket and often a fire, the vegetation turns to eucalyptus and hedgerow, and the fields grow leeks, carrots and strawberries rather than rice. Above the town lies a high, cold plateau that ends abruptly at a cliff with an eight-hundred-metre drop, which is the district's outstanding sight and the reason to come even if tea does not interest you.
Overview
The town sits in a bowl of hills with a lake, a racecourse, a golf course and a stock of gabled, half-timbered and red-brick buildings that earned it an English nickname long ago and still make arriving faintly disorienting. It is a working highland town rather than a preserved one: the market is full of temperate vegetables, the surrounding slopes are the highest-grown tea estates on the island, and the streets are busy with buses. Its peculiar high season is April, when Colombo empties into it for the new year holidays, the racecourse runs, and prices and crowds both spike — a phenomenon almost entirely domestic and worth either seeking out or avoiding deliberately. The district's real prize is above the town: a plateau of montane grassland and cloud forest, protected as a national park, crossed by a walking circuit that ends at a precipice where the escarpment simply stops and the land falls away toward the lowlands. It has to be walked at dawn, because the cloud closes in by mid-morning and the view disappears for the day. Elsewhere in the district there are waterfalls in quantity, a botanical garden of temperate plantings, and the coldest, clearest air in the country. The hill-country railway and the tea industry that surrounds all of this are a large subject of their own.
Discover Nuwara Eliya
The plateau above the town is unlike anywhere else in Sri Lanka: open montane grassland broken by patches of stunted cloud forest, at an altitude where frost forms on winter mornings and the vegetation is closer to a moor than a jungle. A circular walking track of about nine kilometres takes in two viewpoints and a waterfall, and its purpose is the escarpment edge, where the plateau ends in a sheer drop of several hundred metres with the lowlands laid out far below and, on the clearest mornings, a glimpse of the distant coast. The essential piece of planning is the hour: the view is reliably open at first light and reliably gone by around nine or ten, when cloud rolls up the escarpment and fills the gap completely. Everyone who arrives at eleven sees white. Start before dawn, take a warm layer that you will feel ridiculous carrying in Sri Lanka and grateful for at the top, and walk the loop in the direction that reaches the edge first.
Ways to Experience This Destination
A nine-kilometre loop across high montane grassland to an escarpment edge with a several-hundred-metre drop — open at first light, closed by cloud by mid-morning.
Gabled roofs and brick chimneys around a small lake, a racecourse and a golf course, evening fires in the older hotels, and a market piled with temperate vegetables.
The domestic high season, when Colombo moves to the hills for the new year holidays and the racecourse runs — worth seeking out or avoiding, but not stumbling into.
An unusual concentration of falls along the escarpment, and a botanical garden of temperate plantings that grow nowhere else in the country.
Frequently asked questions
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