Nuwara Eliya

Nuwara Eliya

Nuwara Eliya is Sri Lanka’s highest town and a favourite hill station during British colonial times. The town is still touted as ‘Little England’. This genteel highland community does have a rose-tinted, vaguely British-country-village feel to it, with its colonial-era bungalows, Tudor-style hotels, well-tended hedgerows and pretty gardens. The area of Nuwara Eliya is surrounded by beautiful sceneries of tea estates, forests, flowers and streams and water falls. Indeed, Nuwara Eliya is one of the major tea producing areas in the world.

Due to the high altitude, Nuwara Eliya has a much cooler climate than the lowlands of Sri Lanka, with a mean annual temperature of 16 °C. But the temperature changes and sometimes it can be as low as 3°C. In the winter months it is quite cold at night, and there can even be frost. Although it rapidly warms up as the tropical sun climbs higher during the day. Though the city of Nuwara Eliya has no Railway station, the highland railway line that winds past the city of Nanu Oya makes the journey by train one of the most scenic and memorable experiences.  The journey to Nuwara Eliya from Kandy by train as well as by car is equally spectacular.