The rock fortress, and the kingdoms that came before and after it

Sigiriya rises almost two hundred metres out of flat forest in the middle of Sri Lanka's cultural triangle, a single granite outcrop with an abruptness that makes it look engineered rather than natural. It was, briefly and dramatically, both: in the late fifth century, King Kashyapa built a palace complex on and around its summit, reached by a staircase that in places passes through the paws of an enormous lion carved into the rock face, the origin of the name, Sinhagiri, or Lion Rock. What survives of the summit palace, along with water gardens at the base and a gallery of frescoes on the rock's sheer western face, makes Sigiriya one of the best-preserved examples of ancient urban planning anywhere in South Asia.

The frescoes themselves, a series of painted women generally thought to depict either celestial nymphs or royal attendants, survive in a sheltered pocket of the rock face reached by a spiral metal stairway, protected from the elements by an overhang that has kept the pigment legible for some fifteen centuries. Nearby, the Mirror Wall, once polished smooth enough to reflect a passing figure, carries centuries of visitor graffiti in old Sinhala script, verses left by pilgrims and travellers between roughly the sixth and thirteenth centuries, which historians now treat as one of the more unusual surviving records of ordinary literacy from the period.

A reign that lasted less than two decades

Kashyapa's occupation of Sigiriya was short. He had taken the throne by deposing, and by most accounts killing, his father, and ruled from the rock fortress for a little under twenty years before being defeated in battle by his half-brother, who had fled to India and returned with an army. Whether Sigiriya was built primarily as a palace, a monastery, or a fortified retreat from a throne gained by violence is still debated by historians, and the honest answer is probably some combination of all three. After Kashyapa's death, the site reverted to use as a Buddhist monastery, a role it kept for centuries afterward. The water gardens at the base of the rock, fed by an engineered system of channels, ponds and fountains that still functions after the seasonal rains, are considered among the oldest surviving landscaped gardens anywhere in Asia, evidence that the planning here extended well beyond the summit palace itself.

Anuradhapura, older and longer-lived

Sigiriya's episode sits inside a much longer story. Anuradhapura, an hour or so away, was Sri Lanka's capital for well over a thousand years, from around the fourth century BC until the early eleventh century AD, and remains one of the most significant Buddhist sites in the world. Its sacred Bodhi tree, grown from a cutting of the original tree in Bodh Gaya under which the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment, is documented as having been planted in the third century BC, making it among the oldest historically verified trees on earth. The city's dagobas, vast dome-shaped Buddhist monuments built of brick, rival the scale of Egyptian pyramids in their base measurements and were, for centuries, some of the tallest structures in the ancient world.

Polonnaruwa, the capital that followed

After Anuradhapura fell to invasion in the early eleventh century, Polonnaruwa succeeded it as capital, reaching its height under King Parakramabahu I in the twelfth century, whose irrigation projects, including a vast reservoir still in use today, supported an ambitious programme of temple and palace building. The Gal Vihara, a group of Buddha images carved directly into a granite outcrop, is generally considered the finest surviving example of ancient Sinhalese rock carving, and the compact scale of the ruined city makes it easier to walk around in a single visit than Anuradhapura's more spread-out remains.

Seeing it in the right season

The cultural triangle sits in Sri Lanka's dry zone, considerably less affected by either monsoon than the west or south coasts, but the most comfortable months for climbing Sigiriya's exposed stairways and walking the wider ruins remain the dry season proper, December to March, before the build-up of heat and humidity that precedes the southwest monsoon later in the year.