Vietnam's highland escape — French colonial villas, strawberry farms at 1,500m, and bánh mì xíu mại in the morning mist
Da Lat is the most unusual city in Vietnam — a French colonial hill station at 1,500 metres in the Central Highlands that was designed in 1897 as a retreat from the lowland heat, with a European climate (15–20°C year-round, genuine mist and cold nights), pine forests, waterfalls, and an intact legacy of French colonial villas, chalets, and public buildings that makes it look, at certain angles, like a small provincial French town transplanted to the tropics. The surrounding plateau (the Langbian Plateau) is Vietnam's primary temperate crop growing region: strawberries, artichokes, coffee, avo…
Da Lat was identified as a potential highland resort site by Alexandre Yersin — the Swiss-French bacteriologist who also discovered the plague bacillus (Yersinia pestis, named after him) — during his 1893 exploration of the Langbian Plateau. The French colonial administration built the city as a sanitarium and summer capital: Governor-General Paul Doumer commissioned the first permanent buildings in 1899, and by the 1920s Da Lat had hotels, a casino, a golf course, pine-shaded avenues, and over 2,000 European-style villas. Emperor Bảo Đại, the last Vietnamese emperor, had two summer palaces h…