In 2004 businessman Malik Fernando bought Castlereagh, a decrepit bungalow in the terraced, emerald hills of Sri Lanka’s sprawling tea country. The structure had no roof. “It was in absolute shambles,” he recalls. “There were cattle roaming through the whole house.”
But it had one irresistible asset: “It was what was available,” he says, shrugging and welcoming me to the neat, gingerbread-style mansion on a clear, 80F winter day. That was enough to make it the perfect place for the area’s first luxury hotel.
When Fernando closed 13 years ago on Castlereagh, Sri Lanka’s government was in a cease-fire with a secessionist militia, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and optimism was in the air. He saw an opportunity to cater to fans of his family’s burgeoning tea farms, who were flocking here from around the world. It took him a year to update the colonial ruin, named after a long-ago tea picker who lived there, into a parquet-floored paradise with five bedrooms and a fleet of butlers in sarongs servicing a hillside pool. Over the next year, he did the same thing with three more bungalows, giving each a different style, its own restaurant, and rooms facing the tea fields. Then the cease-fire ended.
Standing with Fernando in front of Castlereagh, with its lakefront views and blooming purple gardens, it’s hard to reconcile that it was just a decade ago that Sri Lankans hid for cover from daily bomb threats. But locals remember it like it was yesterday. The civil war stretched from July 1983, when the Tamil Tigers first struck the Sinhalese government’s armed forces, until May 2009, when the militia lost its last fight. In between, Sri Lankan civilians were in the crossfire.
In the three years that followed the 2004-05 cease-fire, about 350,000 of them were displaced from their homes, 2,000 disappeared or were kidnapped, and 9,000 died. Fernando harbors memories of bomb warnings arriving during dinner, planes getting blown up at airports, and a constant current of fear for his wife and children. Serving jasmine-scented gin and tonics to tourists was a bit beside the point.
But he was among the lucky few business owners who could afford to hang on until better days, thanks to his family’s tea empire, Dilmah. So he welcomed a trickle of visitors to what is now a 27-room resort complex he calls Ceylon Tea Trails—and waited for change.
Today, Fernando’s hotel company, Resplendent Ceylon, stretches from inland tea country to the palm-fringed beaches on the island’s southwestern shore. Castlereagh remains the heart of it all: a place where lazy lunches can consist of finger-size prawns and single-estate silver-tip tea that sells for $1,000 per kilo, and where the perpetually sold-out hotel rooms start at $675 a night.
Excess isn’t the intention. Rewriting Sri Lanka’s narrative and casting a global spotlight on the country’s assets—cultural, natural, and agricultural—is. There is a tremendous upside in doing so: Countrywide, the number of visitors has jumped from fewer than 450,000 in 2009 to more than 2 million in 2016. But with the luxury hotel industry in its infancy, the bulk of tourists traditionally have been backpackers at surf shacks. Sri Lanka is poised to welcome a wider audience.
Fernando, 52, had picked up my sister Jenifer and me in a seaplane in Colombo, the nation’s capital and largest city. When we land in tea country, he escorts us through what he jokingly calls the CIA: Castlereagh International Airport, whose runway is a reservoir. Staffers wait at the end of a wooden pier to gather our luggage.
The unevenly paved, single-lane road to the resort passes packed terraces of Camellia sinensis bushes, crumbling 19th century colonial buildings, and rickety tuk-tuks that grant our van right of way. The road surveys the land that made Fernando’s family famous: His father, Merrill, created Sri Lanka’s first fair-trade tea company in 1988. Today, Dilmah sells in more than 100 countries worldwide. Its mission, then and now, has been to grow and package pure Ceylon tea at the source. (The company dramatically prunes the 140-year-old plants every few years, then manually harvests individual leaves every five to seven days.) Rather than blend small amounts of Ceylon with cheaper varieties from other countries, as its competitors do, Dilmah works only with Sri Lanka’s prized crop. That means its talent and profits are fully retained within the country.