Negombo

Negombo was a cinnamon port long before it was a town. The wild cinnamon of the surrounding lowlands was traded through this stretch of coast, at first under the Sri Lankan kings and then through Moor and Indian merchants, and the Portuguese, who arrived on the island in the early 16th century, took control of the trade and brought Franciscan missionaries with them. The mass conversions of coastal fishing families to Catholicism date from that period, and many local surnames — Fernando, Perera, Fonseka — do too.

The Dutch East India Company captured Negombo in 1640, lost it and retook it, and rebuilt the Portuguese fort beside the lagoon mouth in 1672; its gateway still stands. The Dutch treated the town as a cinnamon and supply station and dug a network of canals inland from it; the waterway south towards Colombo was cut in its present form by the British between 1802 and 1804 and named after Gavin Hamilton, the government agent of revenue and commerce. Under British rule the canal carried cinnamon, coconut and fish to the capital until the railway took the traffic away.

The modern town was made by two things: fishing and the airport. The lagoon and the sea supported a large fleet of outrigger canoes and, later, motorised boats, and Negombo became one of Sri Lanka's main fishing centres. When the international airport was completed at Katunayake in 1967, the nearest beach with hotels was this one, and a strip of guesthouses and package hotels grew north of the town. The 2004 tsunami struck the west coast less severely than the south and east. On Easter Sunday 2019 attackers bombed churches in Colombo and Negombo, killing many in the parish of Katuwapitiya, a loss the town still marks.

Negombo is the centre of Sri Lanka's Catholic belt, the coastal strip running north from Colombo where Catholics form the majority and churches outnumber temples. Its nickname, Little Rome, comes from the number of parishes packed into a small area, and the calendar is built around them: Sunday mass, feast days for each parish's patron saint, processions with statues carried through the streets, and roadside grottoes lit at night. Catholic and Buddhist neighbours live closely together, and it is common for both to attend the other's festivals.

Holy Week is the high point. On Duwa, the sandy spit across the lagoon, the fishing community stages a passion play that has been performed for generations, with parts handed down within families and a cast drawn from the village. Other coastal parishes hold their own Good Friday processions, and the Feast of St Anne at Talawila, further north, draws pilgrims from across the island.

The other identity here is the fishery. Negombo's fishermen are known by their boats — the oruwa, the traditional outrigger canoe with a single sail, and the small fibreglass craft that have replaced most of them — and by the stake-net and lagoon fishing methods used in the shallow water. The rhythm of the town follows the boats, the auctions and the drying racks. Sri Lankan and European families who come back year after year to the same guesthouses have made the beach strip an unusually settled kind of resort.

About 140,000 people live in Negombo and its immediate suburbs, making it one of the larger towns on the west coast. Roman Catholics are the majority, alongside Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu communities, and Sinhala and Tamil are both widely spoken, with a distinctive coastal dialect.

Three things employ most people: fishing, the airport and the garment industry. The lagoon and offshore fleets support boat owners, crews, auctioneers, ice suppliers, dryers and market traders. The Katunayake free trade zone next door is one of the country's largest concentrations of clothing factories, and its mostly female workforce lives in boarding houses around the airport. Tourism is the third leg, employing hotel and restaurant staff, drivers and guides, and it is far more exposed than the others to events far away.

Mornings start before dawn at the fish market, where the auction is finished by the time most visitors are awake. Schoolchildren fill the buses at seven, factory shifts change through the day, and in the evening families walk on the beach and the bars along Porutota Road fill up. The town's pressures are familiar ones: declining catches and disputes over fishing methods in the lagoon, pollution and encroachment on the mangroves, the cost of living since the 2022 economic crisis, and the seasonal nature of tourist work.

Seafood is the point of Negombo. Lagoon crab, cooked as a rich curry in coconut milk with chilli, pepper and curry leaves, is the dish most associated with the town, followed by prawns of every size and cuttlefish, usually devilled — stir-fried with onion, chilli and tomato until dark and hot. Seer fish, tuna and skipjack come off the boats each morning; ambul thiyal, a dry sour curry made with goraka and black pepper, is the coastal way of preserving them.

The kitchen behind that is standard Sri Lankan and very good: rice with several curries, pol sambol of grated coconut, chilli and lime, mallung of chopped greens, and papadams. Hoppers and string hoppers appear morning and evening, kottu roti is the late-night dish, and the bakeries sell short eats all day — fish buns, cutlets, Chinese rolls. Catholic households keep their own festival table, with breudher at Christmas and love cake made from semolina, cashew and spices.

Dried fish, karawala, is a local trade as much as a food, salted and laid out on racks near the lagoon and sold across the country. Isso wade, crisp lentil patties topped with a whole prawn, are sold on the beach in the evening, and king coconut and faluda, a rose-syrup and ice-cream drink, are the usual cold refreshments. The beach strip adds European and Chinese cooking for long-staying guests, but the seafood is what people come back for.