Homes From Home | Sri Lanka's 50 Best Hotels

Sri Lanka’s auberge actuaries estimate that the island has well over 2,500 hotels.  But if you had to stay in just fifty, which ones would you be most blessed to choose from – and why?

What modest moral argument there ever is to pick out the best in anything is fatally undermined in this guide, for it presents merely my point of view.  No judge, still less a democratically elected jury, is on hand to mediate and amend. The choices are, at worst, biased; at best, whimsical.  Nevertheless, my happiest stays best explain the most likely contenders for others' happiest stays.

Of Sri Lanka’s 10,000+ places listed as offering accommodation, the greater majority are privately let villas and apartments, supplemented by homestays. Less than a quarter of its accommodation is classified as a hotel, 2,500 in all.

A third of these hotels are 4-star, and fewer than 8% (200) are rated 5-star.

For a small island still greatly overlooked by international visitors who are more accustomed to visiting Thailand, the Maldives or India, this may seem more than sufficient – but most of the 200 5-star hotels are small private operations that focus on providing authentic boutique experiences rather than long corridors of identical bedrooms.

The hotel chains that dominate the rest of the world have yet to put in much of an appearance in Sri Lanka. Even so, as tourism roves forward on its somewhat uneven upward trajectory across the island, local chains – such as Jetwing, Cinnamon, Resplendent, Tangerine, Teardrop, Taru and Uga - are developing a growing reputation for exceptional hospitality that can be evenly experienced in any of their branded hotels.

Most hotel development has, of course, followed the tourists and so hugs the coastline from Negombo, near the airport, to Yala in the far south, with the greater number coalescing around Galle.

A much more modest sprinkling of other 5-star hotel dust settles over locations such as Kandy and the cultural triangle, with a few outstanding examples reaching out into the north and east.

We start, as visitors rarely do, in Colombo, where 14 hotels jostle for attention, a mere handful of the many others, and more are being built now.

Affordable, comfortably tatty, and very environmentally minded, The Colombo Court Hotel & Spa is a much-overlooked boutique hotel within walking distance of many of Colombo’s nicest haunts. Sitting just off the traffic jam that is Duplication Road, it offers a rare calm and tranquillity, with its lush pool and rooftop bar among its many subtle delights.

More noticeably, boutique chic is Maniumpathy.  By checking in at the beautifully restored walawwa, you can pretend that you are anywhere but in a big city. Cool, quiet, and calm, the little hotel, despite having changed hands multiple times, is an excellent option for anyone wishing to replace big-brand hotels with something on a much more human scale.

For a fine establishment boutique, you can’t beat Tintagel. The graceful Colombo residence of the Bandaranaike families and scene of the assassination of S.W.R. Bandaranaike, Tintagel, is now an impressive boutique hotel run by the Paradise Road designer and entrepreneur, Udayshanth Fernando. If sinking into unquestionable peace and luxury is your principal need, this is the place for you.

At the other end, boutique casual, you might say, is Uga Residence.  The landmark hotel in Uga Residence, a small, growing local chain, is a 19th-century mansion that has morphed delightfully into a lavish boutique hotel. Set like a delightful navel in the heart of the city, its bar offers an inexhaustible range of whiskeys.

Colombo’s most famous hotel, The Galle Face Hotel, has a Victorian-era guest list that reads like Who’s Who of the time. This iconic hotel is the only one in Colombo that still enjoys direct sea access – though bathing off its slim, rocky beach invites prescient thoughts of mortality. It started life as a modest Dutch Guesthouse before the opening of the Suez Canal turned the trickle of eastward-bound Europeans into a river.

Continually enlarged and upgraded, most notably by Thomas Skinner in 1894, it became the city’s top luxury meeting point, attracting an international A-list. Gandhi, Noel Coward, Che Guevara, Yuri Gagarin, Nixon, Prince Philip, and Elizabeth Taylor all booked rooms. Vivien Leigh sulked in her bedroom, sent home in disgrace by her husband Laurence Olivier.

Little has changed since her repeated calls to room service: it is just as lovely, having weathered a recent upgrade with rare good taste. It is the best place to Watch Weddings, as it hosts around 1,000 society weddings a year. Enjoy them as you nibble Battenburg cakes on the terrace, sip Pimm’s and watch the Crow Man scare away the birds.

The Cinnamon Grand is the flagship hotel in a chain of Cinnamon Hotels, a stone’s throw from the President’s Office. Despite its corporate, blocky architecture, its secret weapon is its people. It makes a point of knowing who you actually are and what you really want. From lavish pools to flaky croissants, themed restaurants to battleship-sized reception desks, it offers all you would hope for from a large, successful hotel.

Still a beacon for cloistered modernity is Colombo’s Hilton Hotel.  Weathering a troubled birth, it was nevertheless one of the first globally branded hotels to wash up on Colombo’s then more parochial shores. It was finally launched in 1987, a year which, but for this, the country would choose not to dwell upon. Civil war raged, Jaffna was besieged, and a series of murderous race riots broke out. But to honour the hotel’s thirty years of indefatigably providing guests with all the best services of a major hotel (and one of the best brunches on offer in the city), a stamp and a first-day cover were issued by the Sri Lanka Post in 2017.

Its new competitors, however, are giving it a run for its money. 

One of the milestones in Colombo’s journey from an overlooked and embattled post-Independence past into a more materially glamorous future was the creation of the high-rise Shangri-La Hotel.

Built by the Chinese as a sort of offshoot of their Belt-and-Braces mission, it overlooks the sea at Galle Face Green with half a dozen bars and restaurants, and lavish bedrooms well able to match the best in any other globally branded five-star hotel.

Just a stone’s throw away is China’s greater investment in the country - Colombo International Financial City, a 300-acre, $15 billion, special economic zone reclaimed from the sea, which, the suits claim, will be a place that “fuzes the culture and energy of a nation with best international practice.” Whilst the exact meaning of this penetrating solipsism is hard to unpick, and the planned architecture so modernistically predictable as to make it tricky to know whether you are in Dubai, Shanghai, or London Docklands, Pricewaterhouse Coopers insists it will add almost twelve billion dollars to the country’s annual GDP.

And then there is the Taj Samudra.  One of the oldest luxury hotels in Colombo, the Taj was built before the city’s sea-facing land commanded astonishing premiums. It therefore enjoys a rare, calming green skirt of lush gardens and wings that spread rather than rise. Scion of the Taj India chain, it offers its guests everything they might hope for from a massive corporate hotel, including excellent restaurants (especially YUMI), a hair salon – and, hidden in its gardens, all that‘s left of the Colombo Club, established in 1871 for the purpose of establishing and maintaining reading, billiard, card, and refreshment rooms in Colombo for the benefit of the members”.

JETWING SEVEN, off a quiet downtown street, is a sibling of the island’s leading independent hotel chain.  The chain has over 30 hotels and villas operating to standards and dining standards that most other international hotel chains might be smart to pay attention to. Their Colombo hotel offers one of the best sunset views in the city, with an abundant bar encircling a pool and languid seating from which to enjoy the urban panorama.

The Kingsbury, like the man who sells you your morning coffee, is a contact on the city hotel scene.  A splendidly straightforward 5-star hotel situated at the top end of Galle Face Green with views onto the Old Parliament, the sea, and the docks. Yue Chuan, one of its several restaurants, serves up some of the best Chinese food in Colombo.

Worth a peep is The Grand Oriental Hotel.  Home to Dutch governors and British squaddies, it was turned into a luxury billet back in 1875, and fights on still. Its bar offers one of the best views of Colombo Harbour.

But beating the lot is Number 11.  Hidden down the 33rd Lane that turns off Colombo’s Bagatelle Road is Geoffray Bawa’s private town house, a rambling architectural marvel and museum which, whilst not run as a regular hotel, lets out two rooms to visitors. With demand far outstripping supply, getting to stay there can prove tricky. Still, lucky guests then have the great good fortune of having the entire museum, with its gorgeous assemblage of curios and masterpieces, all to themselves once the day trippers have gone.

A little outside the city, one of the old grand dames of the jhotel world is The Mount Lavinia Hotel.  Built in 1806 by the British Governor, Sir Thomas Maitland, Mount Lavinia gained immediate fame for its not-so-secret tunnel linking the governor’s wine cellar to the home of his burgher lover.

Successive governors would go on to use it as their out-of-town seaside retreat, enjoying its thoughtful siting on a rock overlooking the sea and two pleasant beaches, restyling it in 1830 as an Italianate palace. With 275 rooms, it has operated as a hotel since 1947 and is much loved as a wedding venue and brunch spot. An illustration of a photograph by Alfred William Amandus Plate of The Mount Lavinia Hotel and Bathing Pavilion from 1890-1910.

Moving from the city to the Central province and the start of the hill country, the first hotel encountered is mine - The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.  An Art Deco plantation manor close to Kandy, the Elephant Orphanage, Sigiriya, and Dambulla, the hotel is a little slice of heaven. Surrounded by jungle and its own plantations of spices, timber, coconut, and rubber, it pairs contemporary Sri Lankan art with European Modernism. It fuses classic Sri Lankan food with familiar European dishes. Restored with the help of the celebrated Sri Lankan architect Channa Daswatte, it is set beside the Galagedera Pass, where a Kandyan King thwarted the Dutch East India Army's attempt to invade the island’s last independent kingdom in 1765. The hotel is also home to The Ceylon Press, a digital publishing initiative set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka, and to a rare collection of island schnauzers.

No list of Sri Lankan hotels would be complete without Helga Blow’s famous anti-hotel - Helga’s Folly. Sri Lanka’s last great eccentric, Helga Blow, Dior model, and niece of architect Minette de Silva, returned to her homeland in 1988. Seeking therapeutic distractions from a torturous divorce, she set about decorating her home with extraordinary murals. Home became a hotel, and guests can still find Madame Helga (as in the Stereophonics song), walking the lush corridors of her Kandy eyrie in Philip Treacy hats, doyenne of “an eccentric collision between Faulty Towers and Absolutely Fabulous.”

In Kandy, central, is The Queen's Hotel, through which the crown has slipped at this once grandest of grand hotels. Built by the last King of Kandy before being grabbed by the British Governor, The Queen’s Hotel opened as one of the island’s top hotels in 1869, attracting the great, the good and the wickedly wealthy. Its bar served Lord Mountbatten of Burma and every luminary before with rounds of cocktails and peppery gins.

From its priceless position next to the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, guests can watch the birds on the Sea of Milk, as the lake across the lake is called. Now more of an elderly stolid county maiden than a glamorous queen, it remains a decent and charming place, especially for those in search of shade, beer, and a rest from the relentless tide of busy Kandyans shopping and sightseeing just beyond its doors.

Nearby, overlooking the lake, is The Suisse Hotel. Initially built in the 17th century by a minister of the Kandyan king, the Suisse hotel was named after its sale to Madame Burdayron, an intrepid Swiss hotelier. Lord Mountbatten gave her a block booking from 1943-45 when he took over the entire hotel as the Headquarters of the Southeast Asia Command. It is now run as a 90-room hotel owned by the Ceylon Hotels Corporation, standing on 4 acres of gardens in Kandy, and offering a service and décor that are serviceably vintage.

From the centre of the island, we now head south, deeper into the hills, stopping first at The Amba Estate.  Just a short drive out of Ella, Amba modestly defines itself as a farm stay. Set amidst lofty mountains, it is much more than that– a 130-acre organic farm, the centre of the growing artisanal tea movement on the island and an actual social enterprise that delivers on its stated mission: “to maximise local employment and incomes, while preserving and restoring the natural environment.” With stunning walks and tea tasting like no other, a stay here gives you all the pleasure of earning a gold star, with none of the typically irksome effort that often accompanies it.

Just down the valley lives its luxury neighbour, 98 Acres Resort & Spa, a sort of panoramic organic grunge-lux hotel. Made up of a series of chalets perched on a hilltop, its style is laid out in generous helpings of real wood, granite, railway sleepers and large windows whose sweeping views will outcompete most other holiday photographs.

Utter luxury is to be had at Ceylon Tea Trails, a rare Sri Lankan inclusion in Relais & Châteaux’s list of Leading Hotels. Based near Hatton, it comprises five separate planters’ bungalows perched at 1,250 metres overlooking tea. It is the kind of place Louis XV might have dropped into for a decent cup had his armies ever strayed out of India in the 18th century.

The president of Hill Country Hotels is The Grand, the definitive jewel in the Tangerine Group Hotels collection of excellently run hotels.  It was built by the Duke of Wellington’s adjutant, Sir Edward Barnes, in 1828, a holiday home fit for the busy Colonial Governor he was. In his short time in office, he oversaw the construction of the Colombo-Kandy road, the first population census, and the introduction of coffee to the island.

By 1843, the home had become a hotel, to be added to over the decades with a Governor’s Wing, a Southern Golf Wing, Tudor facades, and all the other opulent necessities of a first-class colonial hotel. Its Edwardian luxury is now mediated by such things as a Mindfulness Studio, a dizzying range of restaurants and bars, and gardens large enough to keep at bay the ever greater crowds who cleave to the cool climate of Nuwara Eliya.

Its lovely rival is Jetwing St Andrew's, one of the country’s most iconic heritage hotels, which began life in 1875 as the Scots Club. A somewhat torturous life then lay before it - as a hotel flickering between boom and bust, a rest centre for soldiers and sailors, a refuge for Tamil labourers – before finally being bought by Jetwing in 1987. Since then, it has gone from strength to elegant strength, big enough to be impressive but small enough to be personal.

But if you're in search of total peace, try The Living Heritage.  Tucked away inside an area known as God’s Forest, this is the most personal of personal hotels, a one-off home-from-home type of place close to Adam’s Peak and Lipton’s Seat. With understated elegance and a focus on ecological sustainability, it gently connects its guests to its incredible surrounding wilderness.

Heading south, many of the best hotels cluster around Galle.

Fort Bazaar, once a seventeenth-century merchant’s townhouse in downtown Galle, is now home to a boutique hotel of handsome guestrooms, delicious food, and verandas from which to watch the busy world worry past.

The Fort Printers, another boutique hotel in Galle, boasts a restaurant that really does serve some of the very best food on the island, a dazzling gustatory experience played out on Sri Lankan, Lebanese, and Pakistani themes.

The Galle Fort Hotel, a small, ultra-luxurious boutique hotel in downtown Galle, has seen many iterations before it settled most happily into its present form, having been at various times a gem merchant’s mansion, RAF barracks, post office, bakery, lapidary, and playground for local cricketers.

The grandmother of Galle hotels is The Amangalla.  For 140 years, Galle’s most majestic hotel was known as the New Oriental Hotel before being renamed the Amangalla in 2005. Its real date stretches back to 1684, when the Dutch had their headquarters there. Now a heritage hotel with deep, humbling verandas, it has wisely chosen to limit its number of rooms to better focus on the kind of luxury you know you deserve the moment you find it.

Perched on a hill above them all is The Sun House, the ideal place to avoid the tourist crowds of Galle – and yet still be as close to it as any lover.  A Scottish spice merchant built Irt in the 1860s. Elegantly casual, with gardens of frangipani and an enviable menu, it is the kind of hotel that truly makes itself your home.

A stylish private hotel set within an old manor, Pedlar's Manor is located in Unawatuna, near Galle. It has but a handful of rooms, a heartfelt collection of vintage cars and the promise of almost-perfect peace in what has become one of the busiest and most visited sections of the Sri Lankan south.

The Fortress Resort & Spa, a seaside boutique near Galle, overlooks sandy beaches and stilt fishermen.  It is spacious, luxurious, and calming. Its polished bedrooms, yoga, and excellent menu foster such a sense of well-being that even Lazarus is brought back to life, dropping by unexpectedly.

Dotted along the coast east and west of Galle are a sprinkling of other hotels you would be most happy to be sentenced to come the next pandemic.

The Amanwella is the sort of hotel guests often arrive at by seaplane. One of 34 Aman hotels in 20 countries, it knows how best to please. Shy celebrities have discarded Western prime ministers - all have found their way to this uber-stylish retreat with infinity pools and gourmet menus overlooking the golden beaches of Godellawela near Tangalle.

One of Resplendent Ceylon’s Relais & Châteaux hotels, Cape Weligama is made up of 39 villas and suites gathered loosely together, village style, on a headland overlooking Weligama Bay opposite Mirissa. Expect nothing less than the best. And if you don‘t get it, have a hissy fit.  Close by is Malabar Hill.  Ten very discreet villas make up this luxury retreat high on a hill surrounded by paddy fields and less than three miles from Weligama’s surf crazy beach. From its menus to its infinity pool, the hotel is beautifully thought through, a gloriously triumphant expression of hospitality and striking architecture.

Kahanda Kanda is the star hotel in the South Coast boutique hotel chain (The KK Collection), founded by a British interior designer. It is perched on a very private hill near Koggala Lake, an indulgence in sequestered English country-style villas that have happily woken up in a more tropical wonderland than Hampshire, Harrogate, or Hartlepool.

Said to be the last building by Asia’s famous architect Geoffrey Bawa, the Last House overlooks a sandy beach near Tangalle, its capacious gardens enclosing a calm, beautiful structure with just five bedrooms, offering every necessary luxury.

But better still is Lunuganga, Geoffry Bawa’s Bentota country house estate. “Each vista,” wrote Michael Ondaatje, “each location feels like another elegy or another voice—the first person, then the third person, the vernacular, then the classical. You discover you wish to be at one location at noon, another at twilight, some when you are young, others later in life.”

The estate stretches across a peninsula, the lagoon water of Dedduwa Lake on both sides, and views of water dominating the gardens as much as the many statues do - classical and animal, urns, pots, and follies. The house itself gazes out through the branches of a massive frangipani tree onto its sequestered landscape, the hotel side of it now managed by Teardrop Hotels, a local chain that knows all that is needed to be known about comfort.

Nearby is the most glamorous of the Taru villas and hotels, The Long House, which overlooks the sea in Bentota, with artfully designed spaces and rooms, gardens, and menus offering everything needed for a seaside sojourn.

Thalpe’s homage to Edward Lear provides everything you might want from a small boutique seaside hotel at The Owl And The Pussycat Hotel & Restaurant. Lear himself made a brief visit to the island in 1874, travelling by train, mail coach and one-horse trap to the South, Ratnapura, Colombo and Kandy, painting his way from place to place and leaving behind 76 landscapes that beautifully capture the alluring charm of the tropics to a jaded western eye.

The Wild Coast Tented Lodge is also very popular.  Described as “a chic safari lodge,” this cluster of cocoon-like seed pod villas lies adjacent to the famous Yala National Park. Whilst offering both utter seclusion and all the amenities of a luxurious hotel, it also has a well-informed team of young naturalists on hand to help you make sense of the wildlife.

Heading to the east hotel, the range and quality of hotels sharply decline, but it is never extinguished. 

Arugam Bay, rated as one of the top ten surf destinations in the world, remains – one of the surf world’s better kept secrets – but now is beginning to attract plane loads of dudes with boards set upon a week or so skimming its waves. For most hotels, it remains frontier country. Still, for those who wish to go a little further up the pecking order of comfort and luxury, it offers The Spice Trail, a hotel on the main beach with an ethos of local provision that gladdens even the hardest environmental heart.

Alternatively, there is Jetwing Surf – whose 20 ocean-facing cabanas offer a deliciously comfortable and luxurious bolt hole from which to enjoy the surfing rigours of Arugam Bay.

Further on, the beaches of the eastern seaboard are long, sandy, and little visited, though several group-oriented resorts have set up shop on its coves. The best, however, is not in the least bit group-oriented. Uga Bay in Pasikuda is a rare hotel in the area because it knows all about the magic “X” in “luxury” – as you would expect from a Uga branded hotel. Simple, sophisticated, and scenic, it gives you access to all the best sea sports from a base of reassuring indulgence.

But the best by far is a small, serene hotel called Cbeyond Nilaveli. Designed for and with Laki Senanayake, one of the most critical and significant Sri Lankan artists of the post-independence period and a friend of Geoffrey Bawa and his brother Bevis Bawa, Donald Friend, Barbara Sansoni and Ena de Silva, this getaway on the beach is filled with his paintings and statues of owls, sea birds, and sea horses.  For anyone troubled by a troubled world, it is a place of utter.

Heading north, one encounters The Kandalama Hotel, the indubitable jewel in a small group of large hotels owned by Aitken Spence. Overlooking a lake near Dambulla, the Kandalama has earned much of its reputation as one of the unquestioned masterpieces of the architect Geoffrey Bawa.

Built in 1981, the hotel is literally wrapped around a cliff and so well planted that it is all but impossible to tell where nature ends and the reception desk begins. Over one kilometre, its 152 rooms rise seven floors almost invisibly, the entire exterior of the building clad in jungle vegetation. An architectural marvel, it has minimal environmental impact – yet within is everything you would expect of tropical modernism: simple, stunning, efficient, open. Its views over the great lake below are unmatched, as is the entertainment value of having a shower on the top floor with monkeys gambolling outside the windows.

Another great historical site with an attached hotel is The Water Garden at Sigiriya.  Created by the architect Channa Deswatte, and within sight of the vast rock fortress of Sigiriya, the Water Gardens comprises 30 villas artfully arranged around a series of lakes. Minimalist, low-key, and calm, it is a happy place where guests can recover from the often life-threatening climb to the top of Sigiriya Rock.

But of all the island’s sites, none compares with Anuradhapura.  If you have not spent time here, you have not been to Sri Lanka. The ruins of this once-mighty capital are mesmerising and breathtaking - and the Uga Ulagalla Hotel offers a rare touch of luxury within which to reflect on all that you might have seen. Set on 60 acres, this restored 150-year-old mansion is as good a reason to hope that the nascent Uga brand will continue creating more such lovely hotels.

Far north is the Jetwing Mahesa Bhawan.  An Art Deco villa tucked away in Jaffna city, this Jetwing villa serves the sort of delicious Tamil food that necessitates a happy rescheduling of the rest of the day’s activities. Few tourists venture as far north as Jaffna, but its dazzling history, kovils, shallow seas and fishermen’s villages make it the sort of place wiser visitors might choose to retire to forever.

For those who need to camp a night or two near the airport, there is Jetwing Lagoon.  Facing the ocean on the further reaches of the Negombo Lagoon, Jetwing Lagoon is the best positioned and most restful of several Jetwing hotels in Negombo. It owes much of its stunning design to being one of the architect Geoffrey Bawa's first creations in 1965, but its enduring fine hospitality is due to Jetwing.

Money to burn?  Then try The Wallawwa.  Despite being most conveniently close to Colombo’s Bandaranaike Airport, Wallawwa is as far removed from a typical airport hotel as it is possible to get. An 18th-century Negombo manor house, run with precision elegance by Teardrop Hotels, its 18 rooms are the perfect place to land if your flight to the island has been too bumpy.

That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbirck at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.