Sigiriya Rock Fortress – Senior Heritage Guide Sunrise Climb
This is Sigiriya read the way an archaeologist reads it. Your senior guide treats the rock as a planned royal city rather than a single summit – outer moats and ramparts, water gardens laid out on a precise east-west axis with fountains still fed by underground conduits, and boulder gardens where pavilions once stood. Halfway up are the frescoes, a couple of dozen painted women surviving from what graffiti suggests were once hundreds, and the Mirror Wall, where the scholar Senarath Paranavithana deciphered 685 verses left mostly by 9th and 10th-century visitors. One of our favourites admits the writer came with hundreds of people and, since everyone else had written a poem, did not bother. At the summit comes the great debate: royal palace, or Buddhist monastery all along?