A Sri Lanka Golf Holiday: Three Courses, Eight Days, One Island

Sri Lanka is my favourite country in the world, and in the last 17 years I've been back more times than I can count. So when the chance came to put together a Sri Lanka golf holiday around three of the island's best courses, I didn't need asking twice.

The week is the Legends & Paradise Golf Premier 2027, from Monday 29 March to Monday 5 April 2027. Seven nights, three tournament rounds, three cities, and a country that fills every gap between them. One round in the capital at a club founded in 1879. One in the hills above Kandy. One on the south coast with the Indian Ocean down one side.

Most people I talk to don't realise there's proper golf in Sri Lanka at all. There is, and this week takes you to three of the best courses on the island, each in a different part of the country: the capital, the hill country and the south coast. The full Sri Lanka golf tour 2027 itinerary is on the tour page. This is the story of the week, and why I think it works.

Three rounds of golf. Five days of Sri Lanka in between.

1. Royal Colombo Golf Club: the oldest club on the island

Round one is at Royal Colombo Golf Club, founded in 1879 and the oldest club in Sri Lanka. It started life on Galle Face Green, the seafront promenade, and moved to its present home in Borella in 1896, when the Governor, Sir Joseph West Ridgeway, opened the new course. It is still known as the Ridgeway Links. King George V granted the royal charter in 1928. During the Second World War the club was taken over by Royal Navy codebreakers.

It is colonial parkland in the middle of a city: mature trees, a historic clubhouse, and the Kelani Valley railway line running straight through the course. Not many golf clubs can say a train goes past during your round.

The format is a tournament. Shotgun start at around 9am, and prizes every day for Longest Drive, Nearest the Pin and Best Score of the Day.

You arrive the day before, with a VIP welcome at the airport and a city tour of Colombo that afternoon. Colombo has changed a great deal in the last decade, with rooftop bars and good restaurants layered onto the colonial buildings, but Galle Face Green is still where the city gathers at sundown, kites in the air and food carts along the front. You stay at the Shangri-La Colombo, right by the Green, which is also where the week finishes.

2. Kandy and Victoria Golf Resort: golf in the hill country

On day three you head inland to Kandy. It's a travelling day, and one of the best of the week. You stop at the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage, set up in 1975 and now home to around seventy elephants across three generations. Twice a day the herd is walked through the village and down to the river to drink and bathe, and you watch from the bank a few metres away. Then a tea plantation, where you see how Ceylon tea goes from the bush to the cup.

That evening you're at the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, which holds a tooth relic of the Buddha and is one of the most sacred sites in the Buddhist world. You go for the evening ceremony, the drums and the crowds and the lamps on the lake, followed by Kandyan dance. Kandy is a UNESCO World Heritage city, and this is the evening that shows you why.

Round two is at Victoria Golf Resort, a Donald Steel design that opened in 1999 on a 520-acre former plantation beside the Victoria reservoir. The course sits on a promontory with water on three sides and the hills rising behind it.

You stay two nights at the Earl's Regency, a five-star hotel in Kandy.

3. Shangri-La Hambantota: golf on the south coast

Day five takes you to the south coast, with a Yala safari on the way. Yala is the best place I know to see a leopard in the wild, and alongside them there are elephants, buffalo, crocodiles and more peacocks than you can count. The safari is included, in a shared jeep.

Round three is at Shangri-La Hambantota, a Rodney Wright design on a 145-acre former coconut plantation. It opened in 2016 as the first Shangri-La in Sri Lanka, and Shangri-La Hambantota golf is nothing like the first two rounds. The Indian Ocean down one side, scrub jungle down the other, and the breeze off the sea deciding how the day goes.

You stay two nights at the Shangri-La Hambantota, on half board, so dinner is included here.

4. Galle Fort and the Grand Finale gala

On the way back to Colombo you stop at Galle Fort. The Portuguese built the first fort here in 1588, and the Dutch fortified it from 1649. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site and still a working town: cobbled streets, galleries, cafés, fourteen bastions with names like Sun, Moon and Star, and the lighthouse at the end of the walls. Walk the ramparts at the end of the afternoon, with the sea on one side and the old town on the other. There's also a visit to a turtle conservation project on the coast.

That evening is the black-tie Grand Finale gala and awards at the Shangri-La Colombo, and your last night on the island. You fly home on Monday 5 April.

5. A Sri Lanka golf holiday with a non-golfing partner

This is the part I care about most. Golf trips usually ask the non-golfer to sit it out. This one doesn't.

Non-golfing partners come on the same week, stay in the same hotels and go to the same gala. On the golf days they have their own programme, including the Royal Botanical Gardens at Peradeniya, just outside Kandy. The gardens were formally established in 1843, cover 147 acres beside the Mahaweli river and hold more than 4,000 species of plants, with an orchid collection people travel a long way to see.

Everything between the rounds, the elephants, the tea, the temple, Yala and Galle, is done together. The golfer gets three rounds. The partner gets Sri Lanka. Both of you get the week.

6. What's included and what it costs

£2,899 per golfer and £2,399 per non-golfing partner, per person sharing. The single room supplement is £512.

Included: seven nights in Deluxe rooms at three five-star hotels, three tournament rounds with green fees and caddy fees, daily breakfast, dinner at Hambantota, the gala, airport meet and transfers, all ground transport, entry to the sites on the programme, and event management throughout.

Not included: flights, visas, travel insurance (which is mandatory), lunches, optional extras, golf buggies and tips. Extras are priced on the tour page.

Follow On Tours is the tour operator and package organiser for this trip, financially protected by an ABTOT bond, member 5718. We don't sell flights, so they sit outside the package.

Booking works as a request, not a checkout. You choose your rooms and any extras on the tour page, and we come back to you to confirm your places.

Where to go next

If you'd like to see more of the country before or after the golf, my Sri Lanka guide covers fourteen days from Negombo to the south coast, and there's more on the island on our Sri Lanka destination page. For the rest of our golf trips, have a look at Follow On Tours golf.

Three courses, eight days, and the island I love most. See the week and request your places.