What is sinharajaDense, dark, wet and mysterious –sinharaja is a primeval forest for meditation ,relaxation and for scientific exploration. This relatively undisturbed expense of primary forest is a sri lankan heritage –the last patch of sizeable lowland evergreen rain forest still remaining more or less intact or undisturbed in our island.
The forest is steeped in deep legend and mystery the word sinharaja means , lion(sinha) king(raja) and the popular beliefs is that the legendary origin of the sinharaja people in Sri Lanka is from the descendant of the union the lion king who once lived in the forest and a princess.
Today, the spirit of the legend remains captured in solitude in the silent forest and the rising mist of the early dawn. More than time however separate modern explorer in the Sinharaja forest from its legendary inhabitations, man has rapidly penetrated the seemingly inaccessible wildness of the Sri Lanka’s rain forest which once covered perhaps over 100,000ha.Of the south western hills and lowlands. The present reserve is but a glimpse of its former glory, occupying a narrow silver of land 21km. in length and 3.7km.in width, covering 11187 ha. Of undisturbed and logged forest, scrub reserve by UNESCO in 1978, then a national wilderness Area in 1988 under the national heritage wilderness Area act no. 3 of 1988 and subsequently a world heritage site in 19888.
To the casual observer, the forest represents a tropical rain forest with a dense tall stand of trees, steep and rugged hills etched by numerous rocky streams and rivulets. The value of forest such as sinharaja are well known for their functions as watersheds and store-houses of great biologically wealth. It is a rich treasure trove of nature with a great diversity of habitats and a vast repository of sri lanka’s endemic species found no where else in the world. Sinharaja therefore, represent an irreplaceable gene pool, a refugio for all those rare and endangered forms of life, both fauna and flora
