Colombo

A sheltered anchorage near the mouth of the Kelani River put Colombo on the trading maps long before it was a city. Arab merchants were settled here by the 8th century, handling cinnamon and gems for buyers in the Middle East, and Chinese fleets are recorded calling in the 15th century. The Portuguese arrived in 1505, when the port belonged to the kingdom of Kotte just inland, and they soon fortified the headland. The Dutch East India Company besieged and took it in 1656 after a long blockade, rebuilt the defences, cut canals inland and made the town the centre of the cinnamon monopoly.

The British captured Colombo in 1796 and made it the capital of the crown colony of Ceylon in 1815, once Kandy had fallen. The ramparts were pulled down, the Fort became a district of banks and trading houses, and breakwaters built in the later 19th century turned the open roadstead into an artificial harbour. With the Suez Canal open, Colombo became one of the great coaling and transhipment ports of the Indian Ocean, and the railway carried tea down from the hills to its quays.

Independence came in 1948 with Colombo as the capital. The city grew fast and unevenly; riots in July 1983 drove many Tamil families from their homes and marked the start of the civil war, during which bombings struck the Central Bank, the harbour and other targets in the capital. Parliament moved to Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte in 1982, leaving the commercial capital here. Since the war ended in 2009 the skyline has changed sharply, with towers along the seafront and the reclaimed Port City beside the Fort. In 2022, during the country's economic crisis, the Galle Face protest camp became the focus of national politics.

Colombo is the most mixed place on the island and the least typical of it. Sinhalese, Sri Lankan Tamils, Moors, Malays, Burghers of Dutch and Portuguese descent and a long-settled Indian merchant community share the same streets, and English is heard far more than in the provinces, often mixed into Sinhala and Tamil in the same sentence. Faiths overlap in the same way: Buddhist temples, Hindu kovils, mosques and churches stand within a few blocks of one another, and public holidays follow all four calendars.

The Buddhist year still sets the city's rhythm. Every full moon is a poya holiday, when shops stop selling alcohol and temples fill with white-clad worshippers. Vesak in May is the great public festival, with lanterns strung across balconies, illuminated pandals telling stories of the Buddha's past lives, and dansal stalls where neighbourhoods and companies hand out free food to anyone passing. In February the Navam Perahera takes Gangaramaya's elephants and drummers around Beira Lake.

Cricket is followed closely, with international matches at the Premadasa stadium and school matches — the Royal–Thomian above all — treated as social occasions. The city has a small, busy arts scene: galleries and design shops in Cinnamon Gardens and Kollupitiya, English- and Sinhala-language theatre, a long tradition of writing in three languages, and the legacy of the architect Geoffrey Bawa, whose tropical modernism shaped buildings here and across the island. Manners are formal and soft-spoken; the sideways tilt of the head means agreement.

The city proper holds about 750,000 people, but the built-up area that runs inland to Kotte and Kaduwela and north towards Gampaha holds several million more, and the daytime population swells with commuters. Colombo is where the country's money, ministries, universities, hospitals and head offices are, and where families from across the island send children to school.

Work is in the port, the banks and insurers along the Fort waterfront, government offices, IT and business services, garment company headquarters, and a very large informal sector of market traders, tuk-tuk drivers and street vendors. Housing is split between wealthy Colombo 7 addresses, dense inner-city tenement blocks and low-income settlements along canals and railway lines, some of which have been cleared into high-rise blocks. The reclaimed Port City is the most visible bet on the city's future.

Days begin early to beat the traffic. Commuter trains and buses fill before seven, schoolchildren in white uniforms crowd the pavements, lunch is a rice-and-curry packet eaten at a desk, and the evening rush pushes into the night. Galle Face Green fills at dusk with kite-sellers, families and courting couples. The cost of living since the 2022 crisis remains the daily preoccupation, alongside congestion, monsoon flooding in low-lying wards and the price of housing.

Colombo eats the food of the whole island and several others. Rice and curry is the staple — red rice or white with half a dozen vegetable and fish curries, a coconut sambol and a papadam — sold at every canteen as a lunch packet. In the evening the street kitchens switch to kottu roti, godamba flatbread chopped on a hot plate with egg, vegetables and meat, the rhythmic clatter of the blades audible down the street, and to hoppers: bowl-shaped pancakes of rice flour and coconut milk, often with an egg set in the middle, and string hoppers, little discs of steamed rice noodles.

The city's own dish is lamprais, brought by the Dutch Burghers from the Indonesian trade — rice cooked in stock and baked in a banana leaf with a mixed meat curry, frikkadel meatballs, fried aubergine and blachan. Burgher kitchens also gave Colombo Christmas breudher and love cake, and Muslim cafés in Pettah and Slave Island serve buriyani, kolla malluma and watalappan, a spiced jaggery custard set with coconut milk. Wellawatte's South Indian restaurants add thosai, vadai and vegetarian rice plates.

Seafood defines the coast. Lagoon crab, once mostly exported, is now a restaurant speciality in Fort; prawns, seer fish and cuttlefish appear curried, devilled or grilled at Mount Lavinia's beach tables. Short eats — fish buns, Chinese rolls, cutlets and patties — sit on bakery counters all day, and tea is drunk strong and sweet, with king coconut sold chilled from roadside stacks.