historical places in galle
Galle is believed to have been a religious city , from whence King Solomon gathered gold, spices, ivory, apes and peacocks, and the mixture of its fine natural harbour and strategic position on the sea routes between Arabia, India and Southeast Asia made the town
a key trading emporium long before the arrival of the Europeans. In 1589, the Portuguese established a appearance here, developing a small fort named Santa Cruz, which they later outstretched with a a number of bastions and walls. The Dutch captured Galle in 1640 after a four-day siege, and in 1663 expanded the original Portuguese fortifications to enclose the entire Galle’s sea-facing promontory, establishing the street plan and system of bastions which survive to this day, as well as introducing marvels of European engineering such as an elaborate subterranean sewer system which was flushed out daily by the tide and is still in use today.
The British took Galle in 1796 during the island-wide exchange of power following Dutch defeat in the Napoleonic Wars ironically, after all the ingenuity and labour they had invested in the town’s defences, Galle was finally surrendered with hardly a shot being fired. The city continued to serve as Ceylon’s principal harbour for much of the eighteenth century, but Colombo’s growing commercial importance and upgrades to its harbour progressively eroded Galle’s trade. By the early twentieth century . Galle had become an economic backwater, lapsing into a calm decline which happily, if fortuitously, allowed the old colonial townscape of the Fort to survive almost completely unchanged.
In the years since independence, Galle has recovered some of its lost dynamism. Despite playing a supporting actor to Colombo, Galle’s port still receives significant quantities of shipping; there are commonly a few immense container ships parked offshore looking for dock.Wealthy expats have now restored many of Galle’s colonial villas, and Sri Lanka’s Central Cultural Fund is renovating most of the Fort’s public buildings and monuments (with help from the Dutch government), while 2009 saw the completing of a project to convert the Fort’s old Dutch warehouses into a polished new maritime museum – a fitting tribute to the town’s rich seafaring traditions.
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