Colombo City Guide: What the City Actually Is, Neighbourhood by Neighbourhood

Colombo is a working port city that happens to have a great deal of history layered into it, rather than a monument city that happens to have a port. It has no single set-piece sight, no Angkor and no Taj, and travellers who arrive expecting one usually leave disappointed after half a day. Travellers who arrive expecting a large, hot, commercially minded South Asian capital with Portuguese, Dutch and British sediment showing through the concrete tend to enjoy it considerably more.

The city has been a trading harbour for well over a thousand years. Arab merchants were established here long before any European arrived, trading in cinnamon and gems and giving the place its early importance. The Portuguese took the harbour in the early sixteenth century, the Dutch took it from them in 1656, the British took it from the Dutch in 1796 and ruled the whole island until independence in 1948. Each of those layers left buildings, street names, religions, surnames and food behind, and Fort and Pettah in particular are where you can read them all in a few hundred metres.

What Colombo is now is a city of distinct districts that feel almost unrelated to each other. The colonial commercial core, the trading bazaar next to it, the wide leafy avenues of the old British residential quarter, the lake district with its temples, and the beach suburb at the southern end. Understanding those five areas is most of what you need to make sense of the place.

Fort is the old walled European quarter, and though the walls came down under the British it kept the name and the function. This is where the Dutch and then the British ran their commerce, and it is still where the banks, the port authority, the presidential secretariat and a great deal of official Colombo sit. For decades much of it was fenced off under high security, which is why it can feel oddly quiet for a capital's downtown. Since the checkpoints came down it has become far more walkable, and it is the best square kilometre in the city for anyone interested in architecture.

The Dutch Hospital is the anchor. It is the oldest surviving building in Fort, dating from the Dutch period, built around two courtyards with thick walls and deep verandas designed for tropical heat long before anyone had air conditioning. It was restored and reopened as a precinct of restaurants, bars and shops, and while that is unashamedly a tourist-facing conversion, the building itself is the real thing and worth walking through slowly.

A short walk away, the Old Colombo Lighthouse stands as a clock tower in the middle of a road junction. It genuinely was both at once, a clock tower with a light at the top, guiding ships in until surrounding buildings grew tall enough to block it and the light was moved elsewhere. Around it are the grand facades of the old mercantile houses, some restored, some peeling, and to the west the enormous new Port City reclamation, a flat expanse of land pushed out into the sea that is gradually becoming a financial district. The contrast between the two is the most honest single view of where Colombo is going.

Immediately east of Fort, across a railway line and a change of atmosphere so abrupt it feels like a different city, is Pettah. This is Colombo's wholesale and retail market district, and it is organised the old way, by trade rather than by shop. One street is electronics, another textiles, another hardware, another spices and dried fish. Nothing is signposted for visitors, everything is being loaded or unloaded, and it is the single most alive part of the city.

The landmark is Jami Ul-Alfar, the Red Mosque, built in 1908 in candy-striped red and white brickwork that looks like nothing else in Sri Lanka. It sits mid-block on a narrow commercial street, so it appears without warning above the awnings. Non-Muslim visitors are generally welcome outside prayer times if dressed modestly, and it is worth asking rather than assuming.

Pettah also holds the Dutch Period Museum, in what was a seventeenth-century Dutch governor's residence. It is a modest museum with a magnificent building around it, arranged around a courtyard that instantly explains how colonial Colombo dealt with the climate. Pettah rewards an hour of unstructured walking more than any itinerary, and it is worth doing it in the morning when the trading is at its peak.

South-east of the centre lies Cinnamon Gardens, known by its postal code, Colombo 7, in the way Londoners say Mayfair. The name is literal: this was cinnamon plantation land under the Dutch, and the British later laid it out as their residential district of wide streets, large gardens and heavy shade trees. It remains the wealthiest part of the city and the least like the rest of it.

This is where most of Colombo's institutional culture lives. The Colombo National Museum, a grand white Italianate building from the 1870s, holds the island's most significant collection, including the throne and regalia of the last Kandyan king. Independence Square sits nearby, an open colonnaded memorial hall built to commemorate the 1948 handover and deliberately styled after a Kandyan royal audience hall, a piece of architectural nationalism that repays a few minutes of thought. Early mornings and evenings it fills with joggers and families.

Colombo 7 is also where you will find the city's better restaurants, galleries and design shops, and Geoffrey Bawa's own townhouse on 33rd Lane, which is discussed in its own section below. If Fort and Pettah are Colombo's commercial history, Cinnamon Gardens is its self-image.

Between Fort and Cinnamon Gardens is a district officially called Kompanna Vidiya and universally called Slave Island, a name inherited from the Dutch period when enslaved people were held on what was then an island in Beira Lake. It is a dense, mixed, rapidly changing area of old low-rise streets with high-rise towers going up between them, and it contains the city's two best-known temples.

Gangaramaya Temple is Colombo's most visited Buddhist site and an unusual one. Its architecture deliberately borrows from Sri Lankan, Thai, Indian and Chinese traditions at once, and its museum is essentially an enormous accumulation of objects donated by devotees over decades, from ivory carvings and vintage cars to a great deal of small oddities. It is chaotic and much more interesting for it.

Out on the water beside it is Seema Malaka, the temple's meditation hall, built on platforms over Beira Lake and designed by Geoffrey Bawa. It is calm in a way the main temple is not, with rows of Buddha figures facing the water and almost nothing else. Seeing the two within a few minutes of each other is one of the more satisfying contrasts in Colombo.

Running south from Fort along the ocean is Galle Face Green, a long open lawn on the seafront that the Dutch first cleared for a line of cannon fire and the British later laid out as a promenade. It is Colombo's living room. On weekday afternoons it is a place to walk; at dusk, and especially at weekends, it fills with families, kite sellers, courting couples and a line of food carts selling isso wade, the deep-fried prawn fritters that are the correct thing to eat there.

Behind and south of it, Kollupitiya, or Colombo 3, is the main hotel and shopping stretch, where a good share of the city's international hotels, malls and offices sit along Galle Road. It is not beautiful, but it is convenient, and most visitors end up staying somewhere along this axis because it puts Fort, Pettah, Gangaramaya and Cinnamon Gardens all within a short tuk-tuk ride.

Galle Road continues south through Bambalapitiya and Wellawatte, which are less polished and more genuinely residential, and where a lot of the best cheap eating in the city happens, particularly South Indian and Sri Lankan Tamil food in Wellawatte.

About twelve kilometres south of Fort, at the end of the coastal railway's suburban stretch, is Mount Lavinia, Colombo's beach suburb. It grew around the seaside residence a British governor built here in the 1800s, which later became a hotel and still dominates the headland. This is the closest thing to a beach the city has, and while it is not a beach you would travel to Sri Lanka for, it is a genuinely pleasant place to stay if you want sea air and a slower pace within reach of the centre.

The stretch of sand below the headland has a row of seafood restaurants that set tables out in the evening, and sunset here is the standard Colombo alternative to Galle Face. Swimming is possible in the dry season with care and is a bad idea during the southwest monsoon, when the surf is strong.

Getting there is half the appeal. The coastal railway line runs directly along the shore, and even the short suburban hop from Fort to Mount Lavinia gives you the same sea-level view that makes the longer Galle line famous. It costs very little and takes around half an hour, traffic permitting on the road being the reason it is often the faster option.

Sri Lanka's most consequential twentieth-century figure in architecture was Geoffrey Bawa, a lawyer who retrained as an architect in his thirties and then spent decades working out how a modern building should behave in a hot, wet climate. The result, usually called tropical modernism, is a way of building with open plans, courtyards, deep shade, cross-ventilation and blurred boundaries between inside and garden. Its influence on hotels and houses across South and Southeast Asia is hard to overstate.

His own Colombo townhouse, on 33rd Lane in Kollupitiya, is the best short introduction to it. He assembled it over decades out of four small bungalows, and the result is a sequence of small courtyards, corridors and light wells that feels far larger and cooler than the plot has any right to. It is open to visitors by appointment, which is exactly why so few itineraries include it, and it takes under an hour.

If the house interests you, Seema Malaka on Beira Lake is his too, and further afield the Bawa estate at Lunuganga near Bentota is a full day out. For a city with no headline monument, Bawa is arguably Colombo's most distinctive thing to see, and the fact that almost no standard itinerary mentions him is a gap worth exploiting.