Old Town of Galle: Where the Courts Are Moving Out to Make Room for Tourists

There’s a courthouse inside Galle Fort that won’t be there much longer. Sri Lanka’s Urban Development Authority has been pushing a regeneration plan that relocates the High Court and Magistrate’s Court out of the ramparts entirely, freeing up prime real estate for a tourism-focused redevelopment under a public-private partnership model. Annual visitor numbers to the fort already top 300,000, and the plan aims to squeeze more out of a walled town that was never built with modern tourist volume in mind. That’s the state Galle Fort is in right now: a genuinely lived-in colonial city being actively reshaped by the same pressures that reshape every popular heritage site eventually.

Three flags, one wall

The fort’s foundations go back to 1588, when Portuguese forces, freshly chased off by the Sinhalese king Rajasinghe I of Sitawaka, threw up a rough palisade of palm trunks and mud they called Santa Cruz. That original structure was modest. The fort you actually walk through today is almost entirely Dutch work. The Dutch East India Company seized Galle from the Portuguese in 1640 and, starting in 1649, rebuilt it from the ground up using coral, granite, and limestone, finishing most of the rampart system by 1663. Those walls run about two kilometers around a 52-hectare peninsula and reach up to 10 meters high in places, and it’s this Dutch-era construction, not the Portuguese original, that earned Galle its UNESCO listing as one of the best-preserved examples of a European-built fortified city in South Asia.

Getting the churches straight

All Saints’ Church, the prominent Anglican building inside the fort, is often misdated as a Portuguese-era structure. It isn’t. It was built in 1871 under the first Bishop of Colombo, James Chapman, in a Victorian Gothic Revival style, complete with pointed arches and a basilica plan that stand in deliberate contrast to the austere, boxy Dutch Reformed Church nearby, which dates to the Dutch colonial period and remains one of the oldest Protestant churches anywhere in Sri Lanka. If a guide tells you the Portuguese built All Saints’, that guide has confused three centuries of colonial history into one sentence, worth correcting on the spot since it undersells just how layered this town’s architecture actually is.

The lighthouse and the museum

The white lighthouse at the end of Lighthouse Street isn’t the original. The current tower was built in 1939, standing 26.5 meters tall roughly 100 meters from where its predecessor once stood. It’s managed by the Sri Lanka Ports Authority, and while you can walk right up to its base and wander the small surrounding garden, the interior is closed to the public, so don’t plan your visit around climbing it. The National Maritime Museum inside the fort covers Galle’s shipping and trading history with a modest collection, worth twenty minutes rather than a headline stop.

Getting there and getting around

The train from Colombo Fort station is the move, not the bus. It’s a roughly two-and-a-half hour coastal run hugging the shoreline for long stretches, tickets run from about a dollar in second class up to roughly nine dollars for reserved first class seating, and the views alone justify picking rail over road. Once you’re in Galle, tuk-tuks are the default way to cover ground beyond the fort’s walkable core; expect around 75 rupees per kilometer as a fair local rate, though drivers starting from directly outside the fort often quote a flat minimum closer to 400 rupees regardless of distance, so agree a price before you get in.

Practical notes and a seasonal gotcha

There’s no entry fee to walk the ramparts or wander the fort’s streets, though individual sites like the maritime museum charge small separate fees. The ramparts themselves are open around the clock, but almost everything else, shops, cafes, boutique hotels, keeps its own hours and many close earlier than visitors expect on weeknights. The real timing trap is the southwest monsoon, which runs roughly May through September and brings rough surf and overcast skies to this coast; the fort itself is walkable year round, but if sunset views over the ramparts and calm swimming water at nearby beaches matter to your trip, the dry season from December through March is a dramatically better bet.

My own take after digging through the redevelopment coverage: visit sooner rather than later if you want to see the fort in its current, slightly ramshackle, genuinely residential state, because a courthouse-to-hospitality conversion at this scale tends to accelerate the polishing of a place that has partly stayed interesting because it hasn’t been fully polished yet.

Walk the ramparts at low tide near dawn, before the tuk-tuk traffic and tour groups fill the narrow streets, and you’ll have long stretches of the wall almost entirely to yourself.