Horton Plains in Sri Lanka Holidays

Horton Plains National Park is located an hour away from Nuwara Eliya. These plains, formed by millions of years of erosion, lie right on top of Sri Lanka’s mountains. This is an must visit place if you are in your Sri LankaHolidays. Here large herds of elk, silhouetted against clouds of the lowlands, move among scarlet rhododendrons. World’s End gives you unparalleled views of the flatland to the south, as you teeter on the edge of an 800-metre high precipice.

 Buffeted by the wind, the highlands of the Horton Plains NP include some of the island’s most spectacular landscapes, with stretches of grassland and forest, giant ferns, trees clawing the clouds, and peat-rimmed lakes. This strange, wild, almost melancholy landscape was discovered by the tea planter Thomas Farr, who named it after SirRobert Wilmot Horton, governor of the island from 1831 to 1837.

Overlooked by the Kirigalpota Mountains, the second highest range on the island (2395 m), Horton Plains NP forms the western edge of the Haputale range, poised high above the Ruhunu lowlands. Buffeted by the wind and too high (1800-2 160 m) for farming, these vast highland prairies (patna) do not permit any kind of serious crop cultivation and have escaped the intensive exploitation of the center of the island.

This is also one of the top destinations for bird lovers who visit the area to look for several of Sri Lanka’s endemics; these include the Yellow Eared Bulbul, the Ceylon Hill White Eye, Ceylon Whistling Thrush and the Ceylon Blue Magpie. The diversity of vegetation is also impressive from grasses to ferns, shrubs and large flowering trees. The montage forest is very distinctive with all the trees reaching a similar height to protect them against excessive precipitation, the western slopes support the most extensive area of cloud forest in the country. Sri Lanka tours can be organized to travel to Horton Plains.

Annual rainfall is high with the area being affected by both monsoons as well as the inter-monsoonal periods; it is driest between January and March. The temperatures are considered ably cooler than low lying areas. The tea growing area of Nuwara Eliya is a convenient base for visiting the park and Kandy or Yala can be reached within a half day’s scenic drive from here.