Hill Country

The Hill Country, sometimes called 'the Switzerland of Ceylon' by British colonists, is the central mountainous region of Sri Lanka, lifted between 1,200 and 2,500 metres of altitude. It is here, on the green flanks of the mountains, that the British planted from the 1860s onwards the immense tea plantations that built the worldwide reputation of Ceylon tea, creating a unique cultural landscape: a sea of electric green bushes rolling to the horizon, dotted with century-old tea factories, colonial bungalows and Tamil villages where the descendants of workers brought from southern India in the 19th century still live.

The region offers one of the most mythical railway experiences in the world: the Kandy-Ella line, and more precisely the Nanu Oya-Ella section, considered one of the three most beautiful panoramic train rides on the planet. The former steam train, now diesel, winds along mountain flanks, crosses colonial tunnels, skirts vertiginous plantations and clears the famous Nine Arch Bridge — a stone viaduct built during the First World War, now an Instagram landmark. Leaning your head out of the open window, feeling the monsoon breeze on your face and watching the terraced paddy fields unfold remains one of the great moments of any Sri Lanka trip.

Nuwara Eliya, the tea capital nicknamed 'Little England' for its Georgian cottages, golf course and racecourse, retains a strange atmosphere of a British highland resort lost in the tropics. Further south, Ella has become in the last ten years the hot spot of backpackers and digital nomads, with its specialty cafés, its panoramic guesthouses and its hiking trails to Little Adam's Peak and Ella Rock. And above it all, Adam's Peak (Sri Pada, 2,243 m), a sacred mountain to Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians alike, attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each season who climb it at night to see the triangular shadow of the summit projected on the sea of clouds at sunrise.