Travel Sri Lanka with a private Sri Lankan guide who speaks fluent Portuguese. Your guide travels with you through the days you book, explaining the culture, history and landmarks of each place you visit, and translating for you so that conversations with the people you meet are easy. Around you, people speak Sinhala and Tamil, and much of what is written on a temple wall or said across a market stall would otherwise pass you by. Having it put into Portuguese, at your own pace and with room for your questions, changes what you take home.
A shared history along the coast
Portuguese speakers arrive in Sri Lanka with a thread already running through the island. The Portuguese reached Sri Lanka in the early sixteenth century and held much of the coast until they were displaced in the middle of the seventeenth, and the traces have not gone. You hear them in surnames that are entirely ordinary here, among them Perera, Fernando and de Silva, and in the loan words that passed from Portuguese into Sinhala and are still used every day. You see them in Negombo, the strongly Catholic fishing town north of Colombo, where churches stand close to the lagoon and the boats. A guide who speaks Portuguese can point these links out as you pass them, and say where the story is more tangled than it first appears.
What your guide does
- Explains a site as you walk it: the layout of a ruined city, the paintings inside a cave temple, what a carving was made for.
- Translates for you in markets and shops, and in conversations with local people who speak Sinhala or Tamil.
- Tells you what temple etiquette expects, from removing shoes and hats to covering shoulders and knowing where photographs are not welcome.
- Answers the practical questions that come up along the way, such as what a fruit is, how hot a dish will be, or how to behave as a guest in someone's home.
- Sets each place in its context, from the Kandyan kingdom to the tea country and the old forts on the coast.
Book your guide for as many days as the trip needs, from a single day to four weeks, choosing the number of days when you book. Tell us your itinerary, including the parts of the island you plan to see and what you would most like explained, so the guide who joins you can be matched to it.
