Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is an island country.

The warm Indian Ocean is all around it. Big green hills rise in the middle. The biggest city is called Colombo.

Sri Lanka is an island in the Indian Ocean, shaped a little like a teardrop. It is about 432 kilometers long and 224 kilometers wide, and a narrow stretch of sea called the Palk Strait separates it from India.

In the south-center, mountains called the Central Highlands rise steeply. All around them is a lower plain, edged with sandy beaches and lagoons. Long ago Europeans called the island Ceylon, and in 1972 it officially became Sri Lanka. About 22 million people live there.

Sri Lanka lies between about 5°55′ and 9°51′ N and 79°41′ and 81°53′ E, with a maximum length of 432 km and width of 224 km. Geologically it is a southern extension of peninsular India, sharing its continental shelf; hard crystalline rocks such as granite, gneiss and quartzite make up about nine-tenths of the island.

Greek geographers called it Taprobane, Arab sailors Serendib and later European mapmakers Ceylon; it officially became Sri Lanka in 1972. Its position at a crossroads of Indian Ocean shipping routes brought influences from many Asian civilizations. The World Bank put the population at 21,756,000 in 2025; about four-fifths of people live in rural settlements.

Colombo is a big city by the sea.

Kandy is a city in the hills. Long ago, kings built cities of stone. One palace sat on top of a giant rock!

Colombo, on the west coast, is the main city and the center of business; the parliament meets nearby in Sri Jayewardenepura Kotte. Kandy, in the hills, was the last capital of Sri Lanka's kings.

Several of its old places are World Heritage Sites. Anuradhapura was a capital for about 1,300 years. At Sigiriya, the ruins of a palace sit on top of a granite rock about 180 meters high, entered through the mouth of a giant lion made of brick and plaster. On the south coast, the old fortified town of Galle was founded by the Portuguese and grew most under Dutch rule.

Colombo, which grew into the main urban center under British rule, is the executive and judicial capital; Sri Jayewardenepura Kotte, a Colombo suburb, is the legislative capital. Kandy (UNESCO, 1988) was the last capital of the Sinhala kings until the British took it in 1815; it is also the site of the Temple of the Tooth Relic, a Buddhist temple and pilgrimage site.

Anuradhapura (1982), a political and religious capital for 1,300 years, was abandoned after an invasion in 993; Polonnaruwa then became the capital, and its ruins include the garden city built by Parakramabahu I in the 12th century. At Sigiriya (1982), King Kassapa I (reigned 477–495) built a capital on and around a granite peak about 180 m high, entered by galleries and stairs through the mouth of a huge brick-and-plaster lion. Galle (1988), founded by the Portuguese in the 16th century and at its height under the Dutch in the 18th, is described by UNESCO as the best example of a fortified city built by Europeans in South and Southeast Asia.

The middle of Sri Lanka has tall, misty hills.

The southwest gets lots of rain. The north and east are drier. Rivers run down from the hills to the sea.

The Central Highlands are the heart of the island. The highest mountain, Pidurutalagala, is 2,524 meters tall, and at a cliff called World's End the land drops about 1,200 meters.

Sri Lanka is warm all year, but cooler up in the hills. Rain decides the seasons. The southwest, called the Wet Zone, gets heavy rain, mostly from the southwest monsoon from May to September. The rest of the island, the Dry Zone, gets much less rain, mostly from November to January, and dry spells can last more than three months.

A roughly triangular Central Highlands, dissected into plateaus, ridges, escarpments and basins, occupies the south-center; Pidurutalagala (2,524 m), Kirigalpotta and Adam's Peak (Sri Pada) rise there, and the World's End escarpment is a near-vertical drop of about 4,000 feet (1,200 m). A plain below about 300 m covers five-sixths of the country. Of about 100 rivers, most flow radially from the highlands; the Mahaweli, about 335 km long, loops north-east and, fed partly from the Wet Zone, is a major source of irrigation water.

Lowland monthly averages are 22–33 °C. The Wet Zone (the southwestern quadrant and highlands) receives about 2,500 mm on the coast to more than 3,800 mm in the highlands, much of it from the May–September southwest monsoon; the Dry Zone receives about 760–1,780 mm, mostly in the November–January northeast monsoon, and droughts over three months are common. Sinharaja (UNESCO, 1988), the last viable area of primary lowland rainforest, gets 3,614–5,006 mm a year, and more than 60 percent of its trees are endemic.

Elephants live in Sri Lanka's forests.

Shaggy sloth bears and spotted leopards live there too. Peacocks spread their bright tails.

Sri Lanka's forests are home to Asian elephants, leopards, sloth bears and peafowl, as well as trees such as ebony, mahogany and teak. Many of these animals and trees are becoming rarer, and much of the island's old forest has been cleared.

The island has many endemic species, which means they live nowhere else on Earth. In the Sinharaja rainforest, more than 60 percent of the trees are endemic. In the mountain forests of the Central Highlands live rare animals such as the Sri Lankan leopard and the western purple-faced langur, a kind of monkey.

Natural vegetation now covers only about one-third of the land; most of the original forest has been cleared for settlement, timber and farming, and Britannica notes that wildlife such as elephants, leopards, bears, buffalo and peafowl, and trees such as ebony, mahogany, satinwood and teak, are being rapidly depleted. Only Sinharaja and the Peak Wilderness remain as significant remnants of the Wet Zone's original evergreen forest.

UNESCO describes Sinharaja (8,864 ha) as the country's last viable area of primary tropical rainforest, home to over half of Sri Lanka's endemic mammal and butterfly species. The Central Highlands (UNESCO, 2010), made up of the Peak Wilderness, Horton Plains National Park and the Knuckles Conservation Forest, hold more than half of Sri Lanka's endemic vertebrates and endangered species such as the western purple-faced langur, the Horton Plains slender loris and the Sri Lankan leopard; UNESCO calls the region a super biodiversity hotspot.

About 22 million people live in Sri Lanka.

Many people speak Sinhala, and many speak Tamil. Tea grows on the green hills. Most people live in villages.

Most people in Sri Lanka are Sinhalese, who speak Sinhala. Tamils, who speak Tamil, are the next-largest group, and both languages are official. There are also Muslims, who usually speak Tamil, and smaller groups such as the Burghers and the Vedda people.

Most families live in villages, and in many of them rice fields lie between home gardens. Up in the hills there are big tea plantations: tea was first grown there as a plantation crop in the 1880s. People enjoy cricket, volleyball and soccer, and Kandyan dancing has been part of ceremonies around Kandy for centuries.

The Sinhalese make up nearly three-fourths of the population and speak Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan language. Sri Lankan Tamils, long settled mainly in the Jaffna Peninsula and the north and east, form slightly more than one-eighth; Indian Tamils, more recent arrivals from southeastern India, most of them plantation workers brought under British rule, live mainly in the Central Highlands. Muslims, tracing their origins to Arab traders of the 8th century, are about 7.5 percent and usually speak Tamil. More than 90 percent of Sinhalese are Buddhist, most Tamils Hindu, and about 7 percent of people Christian. Sinhala and Tamil are both official languages, Tamil since 1987.

About four-fifths of people live in rural settlements. Tea, introduced as a plantation crop in the 1880s after a leaf disease destroyed the coffee plantations, spread along the upper and lower slopes of the hill country; rubber and coconuts became plantation crops at about the same time. About one-fourth of the population is under 15, and life expectancy is 81 years for women and 74 for men. Popular sports include volleyball, cricket and soccer.