Sigiriya

Why Visit

A 5th-century rock fortress built atop a 200-metre granite outcrop, with frescoes, mirror-polished walls and water gardens still traceable at its base.

Climb the ancient rock fortress of Sigiriya and look out over a landscape unchanged for centuries, where royal ruins meet the wild forest canopy below.

History

Long before it was a palace, Sigiriya's rock shelters were used by Buddhist monks as a monastic retreat, with inscriptions at the site dating that use back to around the 3rd century BCE. Its transformation into a fortress-palace came around 477 CE, when King Kashyapa seized the throne from his father, Dhatusena — reportedly having him killed — and moved the capital here from Anuradhapura, apparently out of fear of reprisal from his half-brother Moggallana, the rightful heir who had fled to India. In under two decades, Kashyapa's engineers built the summit palace, the elaborate symmetrical water gardens at the rock's base, and an entrance gateway shaped as a giant lion, of which only the two paws survive today and give the rock its name (Sinhagiri, "Lion Rock"). The frescoes of the so-called cloud maidens, painted partway up the rock face, are the surviving fraction of a much larger gallery that once wrapped much of the western face. Even the Mirror Wall below them became an accidental historical record: visitors from as early as the 8th century scratched verses and comments into its polished surface, leaving behind one of the richest troves of early Sinhala poetry known to scholars. Kashyapa's reign ended in 495 CE, when Moggallana returned with an army and defeated him in battle; the capital moved back to Anuradhapura, and Sigiriya was handed over to Buddhist monks once again, who maintained it as a monastery for several more centuries before it was eventually abandoned. The site lay largely forgotten by the outside world until British surveyor and army officer Jonathan Forbes rediscovered it in 1831, with systematic archaeological excavation following through the 20th century under Sri Lankan and international teams. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982.