Kandy
Kandy sits in a bowl of green hills at around 500 metres, its lake catching the light in the early morning before the day's crowds arrive. The city is the spiritual centre of Theravada Buddhism for much of the world — the Temple of the Tooth Relic draws pilgrims who queue before sunrise for the 5.30 am pooja, and the drumming that opens each ceremony carries across the water.
This is the highland gateway: the train from Colombo takes around two and a half hours, and from here the hill-country routes fan out toward Ella, Nuwara Eliya and beyond. Give it more than a night.
How Kandy came to be
Sena Sammatha Wickramabahu established the Kingdom of Kandy in the central highlands around 1476, choosing the city — then called Senkadagalapura — partly for its defensive geography, ringed by hills and rivers. After Portuguese forces took the coast in the sixteenth century, Kandy became the last independent Sinhalese kingdom on the island, a status it held for over two centuries.
The final king, Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, completed the Dalada Maligawa's octagonal Paththirippuwa — designed by the architect Devendra Mulacharin — and built the artificial lake in 1807. On 14 February 1815, British forces entered the city and the Kandyan Convention formally ended the monarchy. The temple complex was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
See Kandy in motion
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Kandy has two monsoon seasons: the southwest monsoon brings rain from May to August, the northeast from October to January. The driest and most reliable windows are roughly February to April and again in August and September.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.