Nuwara Eliya

Nuwara Eliya is arguably Sri Lanka's most singular town. Perched 1,868 metres up in the central mountains, founded in 1846 by the British as a hill station for colonial officers fleeing the coastal heat, it has kept the air of a Victorian spa town transplanted to the tropics. You'll find an 18-hole golf course laid out in 1889 (the oldest in South Asia), a working racecourse, polychrome wooden villas with steeply pitched roofs, rose gardens and tidy hedges. Local guides proudly call it 'Little England' — and the comparison is no exaggeration, so much does the atmosphere break with the rest of tropical Sri Lanka.

But Nuwara Eliya isn't only a frozen colonial set piece. It's also the heart of Ceylon tea production — the tea that made Sri Lanka rich from the nineteenth century, after coffee rust destroyed all the country's plantations in 1869. The plantations stretch as far as the eye can see across the surrounding hills, carefully tended by Tamil pickers whose ancestors were brought from southern India by the British. Two tea factories are open to visitors: Pedro Estate (4 km east, founded 1885) and Mackwoods Labookellie (15 km south, the region's largest plantation) — 45-minute guided tours covering the full manufacturing process, with a free tasting at the end. Higher up in the mountains, Horton Plains National Park (32 km south) offers one of Sri Lanka's most spectacular hikes, the 9 km loop to World's End — a 900-metre vertical drop opening onto a 360-degree view of the central mountains and, on clear days, all the way to the ocean 80 km south.