The official capital is two percent of the city.
You will fly into Colombo, sleep in Colombo and say you were in Colombo. But Sri Lanka's capital is somewhere else: Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, nine kilometres east, with around 108,000 residents against the metropolitan area's 5.6 million. And beneath that suburb lies a fifteenth-century kingdom of which almost nothing survives.
01 A capital almost nobody sets foot in
The figures make it plain. Kotte has around 108,000 residents according to the 2012 census, spread across 17 square kilometres. The Colombo metropolitan area, of which Kotte is part, holds some 5.6 million people. In other words: the official capital contains under two percent of the population of the urban region it nominally heads.
One detail sums it up better than any statistic. In GeoNames, the reference geographical database, Kotte is classified as a generic populated place, while Colombo is still flagged as the capital. Forty-four years after the move, the world's geographical catalogue itself has not caught up.
02 1982: parliament moves to a marsh
The site was designated in 1977 and parliament was inaugurated on 29 April 1982. The stated reason was to relieve congestion in Colombo, together with the symbolic gesture of returning capital status to the seat of the medieval court. But the move was partial: the executive and the judiciary stayed in Colombo, which also remains the commercial capital.
What did move, over time, were the ministries. Around parliament, in Battaramulla, an administrative cluster took shape: the Sethsiripaya complex, the passport and immigration offices, the Department of Wildlife Conservation, the Defence headquarters. The capital really did relocate — just to a place whose name appears on no tourist map.
The parliament building is by Geoffrey Bawa, the country's most celebrated architect, and was raised on a five-hectare artificial island created by dredging the marsh of Diyawanna Lake. It was built by a Japanese consortium led by the Mitsui group for 25.4 million dollars on a twenty-six-month schedule. Bawa's idea was to play with "the allusion of symmetry", in deliberate contrast to the organic form of the lake around it.
03 The kingdom that unified the island for 17 years
The symbolic reason for the move is six hundred years old. In the second half of the fourteenth century, the minister Nissanka Alagakkonara raised a fortress over the marshy village of Darugama, with laterite ramparts two and a half metres high and more than ten wide. He called it Jayawardenapura, "city of growing victory", and the place came to be known for what it was: Kotte, "the fort", from the Tamil and Sanskrit word for fortress.
In 1412 it became the kingdom's capital under Parākramabāhu VI, who reigned fifty-five years, until 1467. It was a golden age for Sinhala literature, above all for sandesha poetry, the poems written as messages. And around 1450 his army conquered the Jaffna kingdom in the north, bringing the whole island under a single ruler.
Because it did not hold. Jaffna regained its independence in 1467, the same year Parākramabāhu VI died, and from there the kingdom entered a long decomposition. The Portuguese arrived in 1505, landing at the port of Galle, and signed a trade agreement at their first meeting with the king of Kotte.
The ending has two dates and they are worth separating, because the interesting one is the first. In 1565 king Dharmapala abandoned the city under pressure from rival kingdoms, and the court fell back to Colombo. Only in 1597 did he formally cede the kingdom to the Portuguese crown. Which means Kotte had stood empty for thirty-two years by the time its disappearance was signed.
04 What survives: almost nothing
Here it is worth being honest, because the temptation to sell ruins is strong and there are none. Of the fifteenth-century walled city, traces of the moat and rampart survive at a few points, many of them with later structures built on top by squatters. There is no visitable citadel, no archaeological enclosure, no standing gate.
The most tangible survival from the period is on the outskirts: the Sunethradevi Pirivena at Pepiliyana, founded by Parākramabāhu VI in memory of his mother. Little else. If you come looking for the kingdom of Kotte, what you will find is a middle-class suburb with shopping centres, traffic and a very beautiful lake.
05 How to see it if you go
Parliament, the one thing that justifies an architectural detour, is effectively unvisitable. Prior permission is required, requested at least a week ahead, and foreign visitors must arrange it through a Sri Lankan travel agency, which submits a formal letter with names and passport numbers. The official site also warns that entering without permission may lead to arrest without a warrant.
So the masterpiece of the country's most important architect, in the country's capital, is seen from the far bank of the lake. There is a reasonable alternative: parliament maintains a free 360-degree virtual tour of the chamber, accessible from its website.
And one more thing that helps you place yourself: districts any Colombo visitor has heard of — Nugegoda, Rajagiriya, Nawala — are not in Colombo. They are zones of the Kotte municipality. You will probably set foot in Sri Lanka's capital without noticing, which is exactly what happens to almost everyone.
