Jaffna is another country within Sri Lanka. At the island's far northern tip, this mostly Tamil and Hindu city has its own loudly coloured temples, its own spiced and unique cuisine, its language, its music and its relaxed pace, all very different from the Buddhist, Sinhalese south. For decades it was the epicentre of the civil war that bled the country, and that is why it was closed off to the world; today, at peace, it is opening up to travellers again as one of the most authentic, moving and least touristy destinations on the whole island.
Jaffna's spiritual heart is the Nallur Kandaswamy temple, a vast Hindu complex dedicated to the god Murugan, with its golden gopuram towers, its red-and-white striped walls and its religious fervour, above all during the spectacular August festival. Around it are Jaffna Fort on the shore of the lagoon, the rebuilt library —a symbol of the city's memory and wounds—, the markets, and a peninsula of flat islands linked by causeways, with remote beaches, ancient temples and even wild horses on the distant island of Delft.
This guide helps you explore Jaffna in a practical way and with the sensitivity it deserves: what to see in the city and on the islands, how to visit Hindu temples respectfully, when the great Nallur festival takes place, how to get there on the northern train and get around the peninsula, and where to try the extraordinary Tamil cuisine. And we tell you, with due restraint and sources, the history of the Jaffna kingdom, of colonialism and of the civil war (1983-2009), essential for understanding this northern city that is coming back to life.
Jaffna was the capital of an independent Tamil kingdom, the Jaffna kingdom, which flourished in the north of the island from the 13th century to the early 17th. The Portuguese conquered the kingdom around 1619-1621 and built a fort; the Dutch took it in 1658 and expanded it until Jaffna Fort became one of the largest on the island; and the British took over the north in 1796. Under British rule, the peninsula, with poor soil but a strong educational tradition, gave Sri Lanka many of its professionals. After independence (1948), tensions between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority grew; painful milestones such as the burning of the Jaffna library in 1981 and the 'Black July' pogrom of 1983 led to a civil war (1983-2009) in which Jaffna, the cradle of the separatist movement, was besieged, changed hands and suffered enormously. Since the end of the conflict in 2009, the city has been rebuilding its life and its heritage. Its full history —the Tamil kingdom, colonialism and the war, covered with restraint and sources— is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The less-travelled Sri Lanka: the great harbour of Trincomalee, the waves of Arugam Bay and Jaffna, the Tamil cultural capital of the north, a region shaped by diversity and by war.
Read the history of East and north →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Jaffna you have to start with something many people don't know: for centuries, the north of Sri Lanka was an independent Tamil kingdom. The Jaffna Kingdom (or Aryacakravarti kingdom) emerged in the 13th century and ruled the peninsula and much of the north of the island until the early 17th century. Its capital was Nallur, today a neighbourhood of Jaffna, home to the royal palace and the great Kandaswamy temple, dedicated to the god Murugan.
The Tamil kingdom of the north had its own identity: the Tamil language, a mostly Hindu religion, close cultural and trade ties with southern India (where much of its population and its dynasties came from) and an economy based on trade (pearls, cloth, elephants), farming and fishing on land that was poor but hard-worked. It lived alongside the Sinhalese Buddhist kingdoms of the centre and south of the island, though not without conflict.
Having been an independent Tamil kingdom for several centuries is a key to understanding the Jaffna and the north of today. The region's Tamil identity is not a recent phenomenon. It is rooted in a past of its own sovereignty. When, centuries later, people spoke of the Tamil question in Sri Lanka, that memory of a distinct kingdom and culture would always be present in one way or another. Before that, though, the Jaffna Kingdom would fall, like the rest of the island, to the advance of the European colonial powers.
The end of the Jaffna Kingdom came with the Portuguese. After several campaigns during the 16th and early 17th centuries, the Portuguese conquered the kingdom. Around 1619-1621 they occupied the peninsula, captured the last king and ended centuries of Tamil sovereignty in the north. The royal family was taken to Goa, and the captives were offered conversion to Catholicism. The Portuguese destroyed the old Nallur temple and other Hindu shrines and pushed evangelisation. The Tamil Christian community that still lives in the region dates from that period.
To secure their rule, the Portuguese built a fortress in Jaffna around 1618-1625. Their rule was fairly short, though. In 1658, during their wars against Portugal, the Dutch of the East India Company (VOC) took Jaffna. The Dutch expanded and strengthened the fortress until it became Jaffna Fort, an imposing star-shaped fortification with coral and stone walls and a moat. It was the second largest on the island after Galle.
Under Dutch and later British rule, Jaffna remained the centre of Tamil life in the north. The Dutch governed the peninsula for more than a century and left their mark on the fort, on a few buildings and on curiosities such as the horses and the baobab tree they brought to Delft Island. The fall of the kingdom and the building of the great fort turned Jaffna from the capital of an independent kingdom into a colonial stronghold. That change paved the way for the British period and for the tensions of the 20th century.
In 1796 the British took the north from the Dutch, and in 1815 they gained control of the whole island. For the first time it was unified under a single colonial power: British Ceylon. The Jaffna peninsula, with its poor soil and dry climate, built a strong tradition of education under British rule, driven partly by Christian missions that founded well-regarded schools. As a result, many northern Tamils got an education and took jobs in the administration and the professions across the colony, in numbers high for the size of their community.
Over time, the Tamil minority's relatively prominent place in the colonial administration bred resentment. After Ceylon became independent in 1948, the Sinhalese majority asserted its dominance in the new state. The Tamil community saw a series of policies as discriminatory: the 1956 law that made Sinhala the only official language and pushed Tamil aside, university admission systems that disadvantaged Tamil students, and other measures on jobs, land and political representation.
These tensions grew through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, with episodes of violence between communities and rising frustration in the Tamil north, where Jaffna was the political and cultural centre. Some Tamil groups moved from demanding equal rights to demanding autonomy and, in the end, an independent state (Tamil Eelam) in the north and east. In that climate, and in Jaffna itself, the first armed separatist groups began to appear from the 1970s on. Without fully knowing it, the country was heading towards the abyss of war.
This section covers one of the most painful chapters in Sri Lanka's recent history, with due restraint and without sensationalism. Tensions between the state, with its Sinhalese majority, and the Tamil minority led to a long civil war that lasted from 1983 to 2009. As the political and cultural heart of the Tamil north, Jaffna was at its centre and suffered enormously.
An especially painful event came first, in 1981, when the Jaffna Public Library was burned. One of the largest libraries in Asia, holding tens of thousands of books and irreplaceable manuscripts of Tamil culture, was set on fire, and the burning became a symbol of an attack on a people's memory and identity. In July 1983, an outbreak of violence against Tamils in Colombo and other areas, known as Black July, left thousands dead and marked the start of open war. The main separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), took up arms for an independent Tamil state.
Jaffna changed hands several times during the conflict. It was controlled by the LTTE, saw the intervention of an Indian peacekeeping force (IPKF) in the late 1980s, and was retaken by the Sri Lankan army in 1995, amid fighting, sieges and mass displacement of its civilians. Serious abuses were committed during the war, and civilians from both communities bore the brunt. It ended in 2009 with the military defeat of the LTTE in the island's northeast, after a particularly bloody final phase. The human cost was huge: tens of thousands dead and a deeply scarred society. After almost three decades of conflict, Jaffna was left devastated, both physically and in human terms.
More than fifteen years after the war ended, Jaffna is going through a slow but steady process of rebuilding, reopening and reconnection. During the conflict the city was practically cut off from the rest of the country and the world, but it has gradually reconnected. The northern railway line was rebuilt, the A9 road once again links the north with the centre, and little by little displaced people have returned, the economy has revived and tourists have started to arrive.
The symbols of this renewal are easy to see. The Public Library, burned in 1981, was rebuilt and reopened, and today it is both a working library and a monument to memory and resilience. Jaffna Fort, damaged in the fighting, has been partly restored. The great Nallur temple is full of pilgrims again, and its August festival once more draws hundreds of thousands of worshippers. Tamil life in the north, with its language, its religion and its unique cuisine, is still vibrant and proud.
The wounds have not fully healed, though. Debates continue over reconciliation, justice, remembering the victims of every community, the disappeared, and how much autonomy the north and east should have, in a country still coming to terms with its recent past. For travellers arriving in Jaffna, all of this is part of the context. You are visiting a deeply authentic, welcoming and fascinating city that is rebuilding its life on centuries of Tamil identity and decades of suffering. The best way to honour what Jaffna was, what it suffered and what it is once again becoming, with dignity, is to get to know it with respect, sensitivity and curiosity, with these pages of history as a backdrop.
