Kandalama Reservoir

A tank held by a dam twenty-one metres high and some sixteen hundred metres across, thrown over the Mirisgoniya River — one of the main feeders of the Kala Wewa. Roughly five kilometres long and two across, gathering a catchment of a hundred square kilometres, and it irrigates land as far as Kekirawa. The Department of Irrigation rehabilitated it between 1952 and 1957.

It sits inside the Kaludiya Pokuna forest archaeological site, and between two World Heritage Sites — Dambulla's cave temple of the first century BC and the rock at Sigiriya from the fifth AD. There is a hotel on its shore, one of the first five-star hotels built in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka has been building tanks for two thousand years. This one is seventy years old and does exactly what the ancient ones do.