Kalpitiya

The peninsula owes its history to its position at the mouth of the Puttalam lagoon, a sheltered anchorage on the route between southern India and the pearl banks of the Gulf of Mannar. Arab traders were established along this coast long before Europeans arrived, and the area had links to the pearl fishery and to the horse trade that supplied the island's kings. The Portuguese took an interest in the 16th century and built a chapel and a small post, and Kalpitiya's Catholic community dates from that period.

The Dutch East India Company seized the site in the 17th century and built the fort that still stands beside the lagoon, of coral and limestone, built between 1667 and 1676. From here the Dutch watched the lagoon entrance, policed the pearl and salt trades and tried to shut out rivals sailing from South India. The British took the fort in 1795 and garrisoned it until 1859, and the settlement subsided into a quiet fishing and salt town for most of the next two centuries.

Kalpitiya was on the edge of the civil war rather than in it. Its position facing the north-west sea lanes made it a naval area, and boats from this coast carried refugees and traders during the conflict. After the war ended in 2009 the government promoted the peninsula and its islands as a tourism zone, a plan that ran into disputes over land and fishing rights. What actually grew was smaller and more gradual: kite camps, dolphin boats and a scattering of beach hotels.

Kalpitiya is a mixed coast. The town and the villages along the peninsula are mainly Muslim, with Catholic, Sinhalese Buddhist and Tamil families as well, and the skyline of mosque, church and occasional temple is the clearest sign of it. Puttalam district also absorbed thousands of Muslims expelled from the Northern Province in 1990, and their descendants remain a substantial part of the district's population.

Religious life is public and seasonal. The shrine of St Anne at Talawila draws pilgrims from across the island for its feasts, when families camp on the sand for days, and the fasting month brings a different rhythm to the town, with quiet days and busy evenings. Fishing communities keep their own customs around the boats: blessings before the season, cooperative crews, and a division of the catch that is negotiated on the beach at dawn.

The newer culture is that of wind and water. Since the 2010s a small international kitesurfing scene has grown on the lagoon flats, seasonal and informal, sharing the water with fishermen who have worked it for generations. The mix is mostly easy, but land for hotels and access to the shore have been contested more than once. Visitors are received politely rather than effusively, and the peninsula's villages expect the modest dress and quiet manner normal in rural Sri Lanka.

Kalpitiya town holds only a few thousand people, and the wider divisional area some tens of thousands spread along the peninsula, within a Puttalam district of several hundred thousand. Fishing is the base of the economy: lagoon fishing with stake nets and small craft, sea fishing from the western shore, prawn farming, and the drying of fish for sale inland. Salt pans around the lagoon and coconut smallholdings add to it, and the coal-fired power station at Norochcholai, at the southern end of the peninsula and the largest in the country, is a major employer.

Tourism is the newer layer — kite camps, beach hotels, dolphin boats and the guides and drivers who work with them — and it is strongly seasonal, with the peninsula quiet during the wettest months. The years of the pandemic and the 2022 economic crisis hit the hotels hard and pushed some workers back to fishing or abroad.

The day starts before dawn with the boats and the auction on the sand, slows through a fierce afternoon, and revives in the evening when the wind eases and the town's shops reopen. Water is the district's chronic problem: wells turn brackish, and prawn farming and salt have altered the lagoon. Erosion, coral damage on the reef and arguments over who may build on the shore are the local issues that recur.

Kalpitiya eats from the lagoon and the sea. Crab is the prize — cooked in a thick coconut curry with roasted spices, or cracked and fried with chilli — and prawns, cuttlefish, seer fish and the small fish of the lagoon appear in curries, devilled dishes and simple fries. Karawala, dried and salted fish, is the store cupboard of the coast, cooked into a hot sambol with onion, chilli and lime and eaten with rice.

The peninsula's Muslim communities give the town a food of its own. Biryani, rich with ghee and whole spices, is a celebration dish; watalappan, a steamed pudding of jaggery, coconut milk and egg scented with cardamom and nutmeg, is eaten at Eid; and roti, kottu and short eats fill the evening. Catholic villages keep their own feast-day cooking, and the pilgrim crowds at Talawila are fed from rows of temporary stalls.

Everyday meals are rice and curry: a mound of rice with dhal, a coconut sambol, a green and whatever the boats brought in. Coconut is everywhere, as milk in the curries, as grated pol sambol, as thambili, the orange king coconut sold for its water, and as toddy and arrack from the palms. Wood-apple juice, faluda and strong milky tea are the common drinks, and buffalo curd with kithul treacle finishes a meal.