Dondra Head

Dondra Head marks the southernmost tip of Lanka, where the temple town of Devinuwara overlooked the Indian Ocean. Kings and merchant guilds maintained a complex of Buddhist and Hindu shrines, whose gilded roofs reflected light for sailors approaching the port. Ibn Battuta visited in the fourteenth century and Zheng He in the fifteenth. In 1587 Portuguese forces under de Sousa d'Arronches destroyed the temple and devastated the southern coast, casting much of its stonework into the sea.