Ella

Why Visit

A small hill town ringed by tea estates, where the railway line crosses the Nine Arch Bridge on its way through the highlands.

Wander through rolling tea estates and cloud-wrapped ridgelines, where every turn in the road reveals another shade of green.

History

Before tea, this stretch of the central highlands was sparsely populated forest and smallholder farmland, much like the rest of Sri Lanka's hill country. That changed with the British-built railway, extended in stages from Colombo through Kandy and Nanu Oya toward Badulla between the 1860s and 1924, engineered specifically to move highland tea down to coastal ports for export. The line's most demanding stretch ran through Ella, where deep valleys forced the construction of numerous bridges and tunnels along the Kandy–Badulla section. The Nine Arch Bridge, completed around 1921, is the best known of these; a persistent local story credits its construction to a local builder using timber scaffolding and masonry skill in place of steel, which was scarce during the First World War, though how much of that account is verified engineering history versus repeated legend is genuinely debated among local historians. The nearby Ravana Falls and Ravana Cave take their names from the Hindu epic Ramayana, in which the demon king Ravana is said to have held Sita captive in this region of the island — a piece of religious tradition layered onto the landscape well before the tea and railway era began.