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Another of the Cultural Triangle's great historical sites is the Sigiriya citadel. Arriving soon after sunrise it is a delight to wander alone through the ornamental gardens laid out by King Kassapa in the fifth century. Two hundred meters above you towers the rock of Sigiriya topped by the remains of the palace Kassapa built after he deposed his father in Anuradhapura in 477, killed him, and usurped the throne. Past the gardens you begin to climb and soon reach the most famous feature of Sigiriya, a series of exquisitely executed fifth-century fresco paintings of bare-breasted celestial nymphs. There were perhaps 500 of these images, originally covering an area of 140m long by up to 40m high. Only twenty-two remain, unfortunately, in a sheltered gallery protected by ancient drip-ledges. Alongside this gallery is the three metre high "Mirror Wall", covered with graffiti dating from the sixth to the fourteenth century.

At the northern end of the rock is a large terrace where two colossal lion paws were unearthed in 1898. The rest of the 14 metre-high lion has disappeared; the stairs to the summit pass between the paws and originally continued up through the lion's body. Today, you scramble up a series of narrow metal steps anchored somehow to the rock face until you emerge, breathless, at the summit. The palace complex spreads out here across a stepped plateau of more than one and a half hectares, its three distinct sections converging on a large and beautiful rock-cut pool. This World Heritage Site affords a concentration of visionary architecture, technological ingenuity, horticultural planning and artistic accomplishment rarely matched anywhere in the world at that time.