Galle Fort Hotel

Some of Galle Fort Hotel came in by sea. The walls of the Dutch mansion are partly coral and shell, carried as ballast in trading ships, and a two-year restoration, finished in 2022, conserved them along with the front on Church Street. The house is some 300 years old. Its eleven rooms stand round a courtyard where frangipani shades a long, green-tiled pool and the white columns either side hang upside down in the water. Guests' reviews find the rooms large for a house this age, and the Library Suite, which comes with books for its nooks, runs past 600 square feet. The Admiral Cheng Ho Suite is named for a seven-foot admiral who, the hotel says, walked these halls. It puts an antique Chinese opium bed under a twenty-foot ceiling, which leaves him thirteen feet to spare.

Recommended for couples who have come to Galle for the Fort rather than the beaches, and for anyone curious about what Sri Lanka drinks. The ramparts are ten or fifteen minutes' walk, with Flag Rock for sunset, and the hotel will send a guide round the Fort by bicycle or, more grandly, in a classic car. Ropewalk, the bar along the front colonnade, calls itself the world's first arrack bar and is open to anyone from 10am to midnight. The bottles go up to the ceiling, with a ladder for the top row. The island makes more than a hundred arracks from toddy, the sap of the coconut flower, and the hotel's tasting pours five. The bar takes its name from the toddy tappers, who gather the sap by walking ropes strung between the trees. After five arracks, the walk back across the courtyard is the easier of the two.