Historic Queen’s Hotel

Queen's Hotel occupies one of Kandy's most prominent corners, facing the lake and the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic on Dalada Veediya. Its long arcaded facade, which retains rounded pillars and steel girders in a style reminiscent of nineteenth-century railway architecture, remains a defining part of the city centre, and though the hotel continues to operate commercially, the exterior still gives a clear view of Kandy's colonial-era streetscape.

The site predates the colonial period. It was originally the location of the Dullawe Walawwa, an aristocratic residence commissioned by King Sri Wickrama Rajasinha, the last king of the Kandyan Kingdom, and designed by Devendra Mulachariya. After the British defeated the kingdom in 1815, the building was converted into a mansion for the Governor of Ceylon, with adjoining structures raised to house British troops; it later served as barracks for the Ceylon Rifle Regiment. By 1840 part of the complex was in use as a hostel known as Malabar House, tied to the Malay Regiment, on what was then Malabar Street.

Accounts differ on how it became a hotel: one history holds that it operated as the Stainton Hotel before being renamed Queen's Hotel in 1869 by the Queen's Hotel Company; the hotel's own history instead describes a Pavilion Hotel and Boarding House from 1844, unified and renamed Queen's Hotel in 1870. In 1895 the Kandy Hotels Company Limited acquired the property and enlarged it into a first-class hotel. It is now owned by the state-owned Ceylon Hotels Corporation and operated by Galle Face Hotel Management, with around 80 to 90 rooms, two restaurants, a coffee shop, and an outdoor pool, including named spaces such as the Queen of Hearts restaurant, the Royal Ball Room, the Pub Royal, and the Lord Mountbatten Lounge Bar, said in hotel accounts to be named for a frequent guest.