Colombo: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
Three European powers held this harbour in turn — the Portuguese from 1505, the Dutch from 1656, the British from 1796 — and each demolished a good part of what the last one built. The Dutch fort that gave this quarter its name was pulled down by the British in the 1870s, so Fort is a district with no fort in it: what stands instead is a block of colonial banks, a hospital older than all of them, and a clock tower that was also a lighthouse. Ninety minutes, flat. Go before ten; by midday it is thirty-two degrees with ninety per cent humidity.
A short history of Colombo
Arab merchants were already coming to the port of Colombo a thousand years ago. In 1517 the Portuguese built a fort here, in 1656 the Dutch captured it, and in 1796 it passed to the British, who made it the capital of Ceylon and a port for exporting tea, cinnamon and rubber. In 1948 Ceylon became independent, and in 1972 it changed its name to Sri Lanka. In the 1980s parliament moved to the neighbouring city of Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, but Colombo remained the economic centre. On Easter Sunday, 21 April 2019, terrorists attacked churches and hotels in the city and elsewhere, and more than 250 people were killed.
The ten best sights in Colombo
1Galle Face GreenFree; the kite sellers and isso wade carts come out at five
2Gangaramaya TempleAbout 500 rupees including the museum; number one on Tripadvisor. Verified 10/2026
3Seema MalakaGeoffrey Bawa’s pavilions on Beira Lake, built for monastic ordinations
4Beira LakeDug by the Portuguese as a defensive moat; pelicans on it now
5Lotus Tower$20 for foreigners; 350 metres, the tallest in South Asia. Verified 10/2026
6Red Mosque1909, red and white candy stripes; built by the Indian Muslim traders
7Wolvendaal Church1749, Dutch, and the tombstones inside are of Dutch governors
8Dutch Period MuseumIn a 17th-century governor’s house in Pettah; small and often shut
9Khan Clock Tower1923, the gateway to Pettah, given by a Bombay Parsi family
10Old Dutch HospitalThe oldest building in Colombo Fort, now restaurants in a courtyard
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What is an audio walk?
Tours in Colombo →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Colombo:
Free walking tours in Colombo
Fort, which is not a fort
Three European powers held this harbour in turn — the Portuguese from 1505, the Dutch from 1656, the British from 1796 — and each demolished a good part of what the last one built. The Dutch fort that gave this quarter its name was pulled down by the British in the 1870s, so Fort is a district with no fort in it: what stands instead is a block of colonial banks, a hospital older than all of them, and a clock tower that was also a lighthouse. Ninety minutes, flat. Go before ten; by midday it is thirty-two degrees with ninety per cent humidity.
- Old Dutch Hospital · The oldest building in Colombo Fort, put up by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century to treat its own staff — the company lost more men to disease than to fighting, and a hospital inside the fort walls was a commercial decision rather than a humane one. It was a police station for most of the twentieth century and was restored as a restaurant courtyard in 2011.
- Colombo Lighthouse · A clock tower built in the 1850s that was converted into a lighthouse in 1865 by putting a lamp in the top — it is one of very few structures anywhere that served as both at once, and it worked as a lighthouse until 1952, when the buildings around it grew taller than the lamp and it stopped being visible from the sea.
- Old Parliament · Built in 1930 facing the sea, and the parliament of Ceylon sat here through independence in 1948 and until 1982, when it moved to a new building on an artificial island at Kotte, eight kilometres inland. That move is why Sri Lanka’s official capital is a place almost no visitor has heard of and Colombo is only the commercial one.
- Galle Face Green · Laid out by the British in 1859, and the governor’s inscription says it was for "the ladies and children of Colombo" — in practice it was a racecourse and a golf links first. It is now five hectares of open grass on the sea and it fills every evening with kite sellers and food carts; the isso wade, a fried prawn fritter, is the thing to eat and it is about a hundred rupees.
- Galle Face Hotel · Opened in 1864 and one of the oldest hotels east of Suez, and it keeps a board in the lobby listing its famous guests — Chekhov stayed here in 1890 on his way back from Sakhalin, and the signed register is still kept. The terrace at sunset is open to anyone who buys a drink, and the staff still raise and lower the flag with a ceremony.
- Port City · Two hundred and sixty-nine hectares pumped out of the sea since 2014, financed and built by a Chinese state company, and leased back under terms that became a national political argument — it is a special economic zone with its own legal framework. From Galle Face you watch a new piece of land being made; nothing is built on most of it yet.
Pettah, one trade to a street
Pettah is the old native quarter outside the fort walls — the name comes from pettai, Tamil for a suburb outside a fort — and it is organised exactly as it was two centuries ago: gold on one street, fabric on another, hardware on a third, electronics on a fourth. It holds a Dutch church of 1749, a mosque in red and white stripes, two Hindu temples and a Portuguese-era governor’s house, inside about six blocks. Ninety minutes, and it is closed on Sunday. Carry small notes.
- Khan Clock Tower · Put up in 1923 by the Khan family, Parsis from Bombay who traded here, and it marks the entrance to Pettah the way a gate would. The Parsi community in Colombo was never more than a few hundred people and it funded a disproportionate share of the city’s public buildings — a pattern that repeats in Bombay and Karachi for the same reason.
- Red Mosque · Finished in 1909 and built in red and white brick stripes by the Indian Muslim traders of Pettah, to a design by a local builder who had never been abroad and worked from pictures. Sailors used it as a landmark for the harbour before the port buildings went up. Non-Muslims may visit outside prayer times, and the courtyard is usually full of pigeons and schoolchildren.
- Sea Street · The gold street, and it is run almost entirely by Tamil jewellers whose families have been here since the Dutch period. Two Hindu temples stand on it, and in July the Vel festival takes a chariot carrying the god Murugan from here across the city — the chariot is pulled by hand and the route takes the better part of a day.
- Main Street · Fabric, clothes and plastic, and on a Friday afternoon it is probably the densest street in the country. The whole quarter works on a system where each lane has one trade and the wholesalers sit at the back of the shop — the price on the street is retail, and the price two metres further in is not. Nothing here has a fixed price except in the larger shops.
- Wolvendaal Church · Built by the Dutch in 1749 in the shape of a Greek cross, with walls a metre and a half thick, and it is one of the oldest Protestant churches in Asia still in use. The floor is paved with the tombstones of Dutch governors, moved here from a cemetery that was built over. The name means valley of wolves — the Dutch mistook the jackals they heard at night.
- Dutch Period Museum · A seventeenth-century town house that was the residence of a Dutch governor, with a courtyard and a colonnade, and it is now a small museum of furniture, coins and documents. It is frequently closed without notice and it is worth checking before you walk to it; the building itself is the main exhibit either way.
The lake, the gardens and the south
Behind the Fort is Beira Lake, which the Portuguese dug as a defensive moat and which is now a lake with a temple on it, and behind that is Cinnamon Gardens — Dutch cinnamon plantations that became the richest district in the country. This route runs from the lake through the colonial quarter and then follows Galle Road south along the coast, where the railway runs between the road and the sea. Two hours with a tuk-tuk for the last stretch.
- Gangaramaya Temple · A working temple, a monastery and a museum in one compound, and the museum is the strange part: it is a collector’s hoard rather than a curated display — Rolls-Royces, antique cameras, thousands of Buddha figures, a stuffed elephant, and a relic casket, all crammed together. In February the Navam Perahera procession starts here with a hundred elephants. About five hundred rupees, verified 10/2026.
- Seema Malaka · Three platforms on the water linked by walkways, designed by Geoffrey Bawa in the 1970s after the original structure sank. Bawa is the architect who invented what is now called tropical modernism, and this is his most visible public work — it is a monastic ordination hall rather than a temple, which is why it is almost empty and why it works as a quiet space in a loud city.
- National Museum · Opened in 1877, and the object to find is the throne of the last king of Kandy — the British took it to Windsor in 1815 and returned it in 1934, which is a far shorter round trip than most colonial objects have made. The museum also holds the only surviving complete set of the royal regalia of a Sinhalese kingdom. Twelve hundred rupees for foreigners.
- Independence Memorial Hall · Built for the independence ceremony of 1948 and modelled on the audience hall of the Kandyan kings — a deliberate choice to root the new state in the last independent Sinhalese kingdom rather than in anything colonial. Sixty carved stone lions hold the roof. There is a free museum underneath and it is almost always empty.
- Cinnamon Gardens · The Dutch planted cinnamon here because Ceylon cinnamon was for two centuries the most valuable spice in the world and the Dutch East India Company held a monopoly on it — stripping the bark without a licence was punishable by death. The plantations were cleared in the nineteenth century and the land became the colonial elite’s residential quarter, which it still is.
- Mount Lavinia · Twelve kilometres south, and the hotel on the headland was built in 1806 as the private residence of the British governor Thomas Maitland. The story told locally is that he built it for a mestizo dancer called Lovina Aponsuwa and had a tunnel dug from his wine cellar to her father’s well; the tunnel entrance exists and the rest is not documented.
Getting to Colombo and getting around
- Bandaranaike Airport · 32 kilometres north at Katunayake; the expressway makes it 40 minutes
- Colombo Fort station · The hub of the whole island; the coastal line south runs along the sea
- Pettah bus stand · Buses to everywhere on the island; the red ones are state, the rest private
- Marine Drive · The coastal railway runs between the road and the sea the whole way south
Cheap eats in Colombo
Sri Lankan food is not Indian food with a different name: the staples are rice and curry served as six or eight small dishes at once, coconut in almost everything, and two breads that exist nowhere else — hoppers, a bowl-shaped fermented pancake, and kottu, chopped roti beaten on a hot plate with a rhythm you hear before you see it. Two hundred to a thousand rupees.
- Rice and curry · A few hundred rupees; eaten at lunch
- Kottu roti · You hear it before you see it; after dark
- Hoppers · Breakfast and dinner only, never lunch
- Isso wade · About 100 rupees; only from a cart with a queue
- Short eats · Take what you want, pay at the end
- Ceylon tea · Ceylon was a coffee island until a fungus
- Pol sambol · The dried Maldive fish is the key ingredient
- Lamprais · Burgher food; only a few places do it properly
Museums in Colombo
Sri Lanka has a written chronicle going back to the third century BC — the Mahavamsa, which makes it one of the longest continuous historical records anywhere — and three successive European colonisers on top of that. Colombo’s museums carry the colonial layer; the older civilisation is in the ruins inland. Foreign ticket prices are several times local ones, which is standard here. Verified 10/2026.
- National Museum · 1,200 rupees for foreigners, 09:00–17:00. Verified 10/2026
- Gangaramaya museum · Included in the temple ticket; no labels
- Independence Memorial Hall · Free; a free museum underneath
- Dutch Period Museum · Often closed; check before walking there
- Wolvendaal Church · 1749; the floor is paved with tombstones
- Nelum Pokuna Theatre · Check the programme; tickets are cheap
- Barefoot Gallery · Jazz in the courtyard on Sunday afternoons
- Geoffrey Bawa · His house and garden are visitable by appointment
Nature and day trips near Colombo
Colombo is one of the few capital cities accredited as a Ramsar Wetland City — about twenty per cent of the metropolitan area is marsh, and those marshes are what stop it flooding in the monsoon. There are two monsoons here, not one: the southwest from May to September hits Colombo, and the northeast from October to January hits the other side of the island.
- The wetland city · Ramsar accredited 2018; boardwalks at Beddagana
- Talangama Wetland · At dawn; 34 endemic bird species on the island
- Muthurajawela · The marsh is a colonial engineering mistake
- Viharamahadevi Park · The fruit bats leave at dusk; stand and watch
- Mount Lavinia · The train runs beside the sand; swim at the north end
- Sinharaja · UNESCO 1988; leeches are certain, wear socks
- Pinnawala · Criticised for chaining; Udawalawe is the alternative
- The two monsoons · No off season; the other coast is always good
Holy places in Colombo
Sri Lanka is around seventy per cent Buddhist, thirteen per cent Hindu, ten per cent Muslim and seven per cent Christian, and in Pettah you can walk past all four in ten minutes. Theravada Buddhism arrived here in the third century BC and the island has preserved the Pali canon continuously since — Sri Lanka is where the Buddhist scriptures were first written down.
- Gangaramaya · The Navam Perahera is in February, at night
- Kelaniya Raja Maha Vihara · The murals are 1930s and deliberately not Indian
- Temple of the Tooth · Whoever held the tooth held the right to rule
- Red Mosque · Sailors navigated by it before the port was built
- Kathiresan Kovil · The Vel chariot festival is in July
- St Lucia’s Cathedral · Catholic worship was illegal under the Dutch
Things to do in Colombo with kids
- Galle Face Green · Kites, open grass and prawn fritters from a cart; free
- Lotus Tower · 350 metres up, with a glass floor; $20 for foreigners
- Dehiwala Zoo · 1936, large and shaded; crowded at weekends
- The coastal train · A few rupees to Mount Lavinia, right along the sea
- Viharamahadevi Park · Playgrounds, a lake, and thousands of fruit bats at dusk
- Beddagana boardwalks · Raised walkways over marsh; monitors and kingfishers
- Pinnawala · Elephants walked to the river twice a day; read about it first
- Mount Lavinia Beach · Sand and space; swim only at the north end near the hotel
Nightlife in Colombo
Colombo’s night is quieter than its size suggests, and part of that is legal: there is a nationwide ban on selling alcohol on poya days — the full moon of each month, which is a public holiday — and bars close then entirely. The rest of the time the hotel rooftops, the Dutch Hospital courtyard and a handful of clubs in Kollupitiya are the answer, along with a kottu shop at two in the morning.
- Poya days · Twelve a year; no alcohol sold anywhere
- Dutch Hospital courtyard · Everything in one compound; the priciest in town
- Galle Face at sunset · Free; the hotel terrace serves anyone
- Kottu at midnight · A few hundred rupees; Wellawatte and Dehiwala
- Rooftop bars · Close around one; dress codes are enforced
- Lotus Tower at night · Until ten weekdays, eleven at weekends
Frequently asked questions about Colombo
What is there to see in Colombo?
The top sights in Colombo are Galle Face Green, Gangaramaya Temple and Seema Malaka. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Colombo?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Colombo without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Colombo?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Colombo, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Fort, which is not a fort.
How do you get to Colombo and get around?
The main ways are Bandaranaike Airport, Colombo Fort station and Pettah bus stand. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Colombo, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Colombo that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Colombo for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.