Sri Lanka's Little England — Raj-era bungalows in a cloud-wrapped tea-growing city, high tea served with pink roses, and the coldest night-temperatures in the tropics
Nuwara Eliya is Sri Lanka's highest city — a highland town at 1,868 metres altitude in the central tea-growing region, nicknamed 'Little England' by the British colonial administrators who made it their summer retreat from the heat of Colombo. The colonial-era town hall, post office, race course, golf course, and Victorian-style hotels (the Grand Hotel, the Hill Club) are remarkably intact — time capsules of Raj-era mountain resort culture surrounded by emerald-green tea plantations. The town produces some of the world's finest Pekoe teas in the high-altitude climate, and the surrounding Hort…
Nuwara Eliya was 'discovered' by British coffee planters in the 1820s and developed as a hill station by Governor Sir Edward Barnes, who built a road connecting it to Kandy in 1828. The town became the British colonial service's preferred highland retreat — with a racetrack, a golf course, an English-style post office, and botanical gardens all constructed to recreate the feel of an English market town in the tropics. After coffee blight destroyed the island's coffee industry in the 1860s, British planters converted the plantations to tea, creating the Ceylon tea industry that still makes Sri…