On Sunday our langour lifted and we visited Galle, some forty kilometres south of here.  The 36 acre historic fort on a promontory surrounded by sea and now a UNESCO heritage site, was built by the Dutch who began it in 1663, on the site of an earlier Portuguese fortification.  Within the walls is a harmonious collection of Dutch Colonial style buildings, low and well suited to the tropical vegetation that shelters and softens the structures.

It is a lively place, with small shops selling clothes, jewellery, textiles, ceramics and of course spices, without which there would have been no fort.  Groups of giggling girls and young courting couples formed a large section of the crowds wandering through the historic buildings and along the battlements near the lighthouse, while tourists, including ourselves shopped and ate in the surprisingly large selection of restaurants.

The best of the shopping was at Barefoot, which sells a good range of high quality, colourful textiles.  In the 1950’s Barbara Sansoni, an enterprising Singalese lady, wanting to enable rural women to earn their own money  and foster skills that were being lost, arranged that many of them be taught to weave and she provided their looms.  She then opened Barefoot in Colombo to sell their products and now there is this branch in Galle.

 

Later we visited a silk manufacturer and were shown the textile making process from the silkworm to the weaving.  Inevitably a scarf was purchased.