Sigiriya is a palace a king built on top of a rock because he was afraid to live on the ground. In the 470s CE, Kashyapa I seized the Sinhalese throne by walling his own father up alive, then moved the royal capital to the summit of this 180-metre volcanic plug, the hardened core of a long-dead volcano, to wait out the revenge he expected from the half-brother he had cheated. He turned the whole rock into a fortress: water gardens and moats below, a stairway climbing the sheer western face, and a gateway carved as a giant crouching lion, so climbers passed up through its open jaws. The head fell centuries ago and only two enormous stone paws remain, yet they still name the place — Sīnhagiri, Lion Rock. Kashyapa ruled here barely eighteen years; in 495 his brother returned with an army, the king died, and the rock became a Buddhist monastery for eight hundred years.
The climb begins among those gardens, some of the oldest surviving landscaped grounds anywhere, then steepens into a caged spiral of iron stairs bolted to the cliff. Halfway up, a sheltered pocket in the rock holds Sigiriya's famous frescoes — bare-shouldered women painted in ochre and red, about twenty of a band that once ran the length of the wall. Just beyond them the mirror wall, plastered smooth enough to reflect a passing king, still carries verses scratched by visitors more than a thousand years ago. The summit is a windy hectare of brick foundations and rock-cut pools, looking out over dry-zone forest and the lone hump of Pidurangala across the plain. Today it is Sri Lanka's most visited ancient site, a hot hour of stairs that ends where a fugitive king once watched for the enemy he never escaped.