Da Lat is Vietnam's cool surprise. At 1.500 metres, in the middle of the Central Highlands, this city with a spring-like climate feels like a little piece of Europe lost in the tropics: pine forests, lakes, waterfalls, French colonial villas, flower gardens and a romantic air that made it the country's favourite honeymoon destination. It was founded by the French as a summer retreat to escape the stifling heat of the lowlands, and it still keeps that charm of a hill station from another era.
But Da Lat also has its eccentric side and its natural side. The outlandish Crazy House, a building-sculpture that looks like something out of a dream, is one of the most photographed attractions in Vietnam; the surrounding area hides waterfalls with mountain coasters, the sacred Lang Biang mountain, and miles of coffee, tea, flower and strawberry plantations you can visit. It is also the capital of Vietnamese coffee and one of the country's main sources of vegetables and flowers. All with a climate that makes you want to walk, have a coffee and breathe deeply.
This guide covers the best of Da Lat with a practical eye: what to see in the city and around it, how much the Crazy House, Bao Dai's palace and the waterfalls cost, how to get up Lang Biang mountain, where to drink the best highland coffee and how to make the most of the night market. Da Lat is the perfect stop to cool off, change scenery and discover an unexpected and charming side of Vietnam.
Da Lat is a relatively young city, born at the hands of colonial France. In 1893, the scientist Alexandre Yersin —the same man who founded the Pasteur Institute in Nha Trang and discovered the plague bacillus— explored these highlands and was captivated by the cool climate and the landscape of the Lang Biang plateau, inhabited by the Lach people (hence the name: 'Da Lat', the 'land of the Lach'). Yersin persuaded the colonial administration to create a hill station there where the French could escape the tropical heat, and in the early 20th century Da Lat began to be built as a small city of villas, hotels and European-style gardens, a place of rest and leisure for officials and soldiers. Emperor Bao Dai, the last of the Nguyen dynasty, had his summer palace built here. With its mild climate, Da Lat also became an agricultural centre: coffee, tea, flowers, vegetables and strawberries that supply much of the country. After reunification in 1975, it kept growing as a domestic tourist destination, famous for its romantic atmosphere. The full history, from Yersin to the present, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The last strongholds of Champa in Kauthara and Panduranga, the Po Nagar towers of Nha Trang, the French hill station of Dalat, and the highlands of the Montagnards and coffee.
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No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before a single French villa existed, the plateau where Da Lat now stands was an upland of pine forests, meadows and waterfalls, home since time immemorial to the indigenous peoples of Vietnam's Central Highlands. Among them were the Lach, the Chil and the Ma, groups from the minorities collectively known as 'Montagnards', who lived off subsistence farming, hunting and gathering in villages scattered across the slopes.
In fact, the city's very name keeps their memory alive. According to a widely shared interpretation, 'Da Lat' comes from combining 'Da' ('water' or 'river' in the local languages) and 'Lat' (the Lach people), so it would mean something like 'the river of the Lach' or 'the land of the Lach'. The mountain that dominates the region, Lang Biang, also bears a local name and a love legend between young people from rival tribes that explains its two peaks, much like a founding myth.
This cool, isolated plateau stayed apart from the big cities of the Vietnamese lowlands, with their heat and dense populations. It was a high-altitude world, with a mild climate and landscapes that had little to do with the humid tropics of the coast. That contrast, still Da Lat's great draw today, is exactly what, at the end of the 19th century, would catch the attention of a European explorer and change the fate of these lands forever.
The key figure in Da Lat's history was Alexandre Yersin, the Franco-Swiss scientist and disciple of Pasteur who also left his mark on the history of Nha Trang. Besides being a bacteriologist (he discovered the plague bacillus), Yersin was a tireless explorer, and in the early 1890s he set out to travel the highlands of central Vietnam, then almost unknown to Europeans. On 21 June 1893, after crossing the Prenn waterfall, he set foot on the Lang Biang plateau.
What he found amazed him: an upland with a cool, healthy climate, clean air, pine forests and spring-like temperatures, the very opposite of the stifling heat of the lowlands. To a European suffering in the tropical climate, it looked like a piece of Europe lost in Indochina. Yersin immediately grasped the place's potential and passed it on to the colonial authorities: a hill station could be created there, a sanatorium and retreat where the French could recover from the exhaustion of the tropics.
The idea took hold, especially once the Governor-General of Indochina, Paul Doumer, backed it in the early 20th century. It was decided to found a summer resort town on the plateau. And so, over the meadows where the herds of the highland peoples grazed, the layout of a new miniature European city began to take shape, designed for the rest and recreation of the colonial elite.
Over the first decades of the 20th century, Da Lat was built up as the great hill station of French Indochina. Colonial planners made the most of the climate and landscape to create a city with a European feel: Norman-style and art deco villas with chimneys, elegant hotels, an artificial lake in the centre (today's Xuan Huong), gardens, churches, a covered market and even a golf course. The city came to be nicknamed 'le petit Paris', the little Paris of the East.
Da Lat became the rest and recreation (R&R) spot par excellence for the colonial elite: officials, soldiers and French families went up to the plateau to escape the heat, recharge and enjoy a climate that reminded them of home. Schools, institutes and residences were built, and the city took on a calm, stately atmosphere, very different from the bustle of Saigon or Hanoi. In the 1930s the beautiful railway station was also built, the terminus of a rack railway linking the plateau with the coast.
Da Lat's prestige was such that Emperor Bao Dai himself, the last monarch of the Nguyen dynasty, chose the city to build his summer palaces, elegant villas where the imperial family spent their holidays. The Vietnamese monarchy, reigning under French tutelage, found in Da Lat the same cool refuge as the colonists. That period gave the city its unmistakable architectural stamp, which still sets it apart from the rest of Vietnam today.
The 20th century brought Da Lat, like all of Vietnam, the end of the colonial era and decades of war. In 1945 Emperor Bao Dai abdicated and independence was proclaimed; after the war against France, which ended in 1954 with the partition of the country, Da Lat ended up in the Republic of Vietnam in the South. During those years the city kept its role as a centre of education and rest: it hosted military academies, universities and institutions, and remained a place valued for its climate and atmosphere.
During the Vietnam War, and unlike other parts of the country, Da Lat was largely spared mass destruction. There is even an idea (hard to fully confirm) that there was a kind of tacit agreement not to turn the city into a battlefield, given its value as a training centre and its role as a refuge for both sides. What is certain is that its French-era architectural heritage survived relatively intact, something rare in a country so battered by the conflict.
With the fall of Saigon and the reunification of Vietnam in 1975, Da Lat became part of the reunified country. The colonists' villas and the imperial palaces were put to new uses, and the city went through the difficult post-war decades. But its privileged climate and its beauty guaranteed a future: Da Lat would remain a special place, now serving a new and much larger public.
Today's Da Lat is one of the cities Vietnamese people love most and a booming tourist destination. After the economic opening of the late 1980s, the mountain city the French had dreamed of reinvented itself as the capital of romance, flowers and coffee. Its cool climate, its landscapes of pine forests and lakes, and its colonial air made it the favourite destination for honeymoons, weekend getaways and domestic tourism.
At the same time, Da Lat established itself as one of Vietnam's great farming larders. The highland climate makes it possible to grow what doesn't grow in the rest of this tropical country: high-altitude arabica coffee (which made the region Vietnam's 'coffee capital'), tea, temperate-climate vegetables, strawberries, artichokes, flowers that supply the whole country and even wine. Greenhouses, plantations and farms spread across the surrounding slopes and are part of the tourist appeal.
On top of its French and farming heritage, in recent years Da Lat has gained a new, younger and more laid-back reputation: that of an 'Instagrammable' city, full of charming cafés, design stays and photogenic corners, with the eccentric Crazy House as its emblem. Among the belle époque villas, the misty pine forests, the aroma of highland coffee and the flower fields, the city Alexandre Yersin imagined in 1893 still offers what amazed him back then: a cool, serene and different corner in the tropical heart of Vietnam.
