Unawatuna Beach

Unawatuna is a small bay a few kilometres east of Galle, on Sri Lanka's south coast, enclosed by a headland with a white pagoda on it. It is the most visited beach on this coast and the one with the most complicated recent history.

The 2004 tsunami struck here directly and destroyed most of the built frontage; the rebuilding that followed was rapid and largely unregulated, with structures put up closer to the water than before. Erosion followed, the beach narrowed severely, and by around 2010 there was very little sand left at high tide. A breakwater built to address it changed the currents and made matters worse in places, and a court ordered demolitions of illegal structures. Sand has since been replenished and the bay has recovered, but the beach you stand on is the product of that whole sequence rather than of nature alone.

What survives is a genuinely good swimming bay: reef across the mouth taking the swell, calm shallow water, and a gradual entry. Snorkelling on the reef at the eastern end is decent, and turtles are seen. The sand is golden and the bay is small enough to cross on foot in fifteen minutes.

Development is a continuous line of restaurants and guesthouses, dense and informal, with Galle Fort — a Dutch colonial walled town and a World Heritage site — twenty minutes away and worth more of a visit than most people give it. Jungle Beach, a small cove twenty minutes' walk over the headland, is the quiet alternative, and Mirissa an hour east is where the whale-watching boats leave from between December and April.

The beach you stand on has been destroyed by a tsunami, over-rebuilt, eroded almost to nothing, engineered, litigated over and replenished, all since 2004. What that produced is a small, busy, genuinely good swimming bay, and the story is more interesting than pretending it is natural.