Vietnam's hill station — a French colonial city of pine forests, flower markets, and strawberry farms at 1,500 metres above the Mekong lowlands
Dalat (Da Lat) is a city of 250,000 in Vietnam's Central Highlands, at 1,500 metres altitude on the Lang Biang Plateau — built by the French in the late 1890s as a summer retreat from Saigon's heat and modelled architecturally on a provincial French town. It has an unusually temperate climate for Southeast Asia (rarely above 25°C), year-round flower cultivation that supplies most of Vietnam's cut flowers, a historic French-era railway to the coast, and dozens of French colonial villas now converted to hotels. Dalat is one of the most popular domestic travel destinations in Vietnam.
The Lang Biang Plateau was 'discovered' by the French physician and explorer Alexandre Yersin in 1893 during a scientific expedition, and the French colonial administration developed it as a hill-station resort from 1899. The railway to Phan Rang (coast) opened in 1932 and still operates a short tourist section to Trại Mát village. During the Vietnam War, Dalat was treated as a neutral zone by both sides — the North Vietnamese agreed not to attack it partly because it housed their own cadres' families in villas on the plateau. This unusual status preserved its French-era urban fabric almost i…