Ritigala Strict Nature Reserve

A mountain rising 600 m out of flat dry plains, holding its own cloud and its own microclimate — the reason it grows plants found nowhere else in the lowlands. Halfway up lie the ruins of a 1st-century BCE forest monastery for ascetic monks: paved paths, double-platform meditation terraces, stone bridges over gullies, and no images of the Buddha anywhere, because these monks had renounced even that. In the Ramayana the mountain is a piece of the Himalaya dropped by Hanuman. Silent, shaded, and almost empty.