Culture · Negombo
Negombo has more than twenty churches, a three-hundred-year-old Buddhist temple you enter through a dragon’s mouth, and Hindu kovils in the streets between. All of it within a morning’s walk.
The experience
The Portuguese brought Catholicism to this coast and it took hold here more completely than anywhere else in Sri Lanka. The town is nicknamed Punchi Romaya, Little Rome, and it has more than twenty churches for a population of about a hundred and forty thousand. On a Sunday morning the streets around the cathedral fill in a way that has nothing to do with tourism.
St Mary’s was built slowly, between 1874 and 1922, and is among the largest churches in the country. Inside, a painting of Christ by N.S. Godamanne, a Buddhist artist, which tells you something about how this town has arranged itself. Ten minutes away, Angurukaramulla Temple is older than the cathedral by two centuries and is entered through the open mouth of a dragon, a device meant to strip the evil off you on the way in.
What to expect
Good to know
Colombo, in a route
Best done from Colombo, with the rest of the route built around it.
