World Heritage Site

Anuradhapura has been classed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

The following is an extract from a research project by the Bradford University in England.

Bradford University's Department of Archaeological Sciences has found itself linked with a number of ongoing and new collaborative research projects in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. One of these projects, working in Sri Lanka, has been working at the ancient city of Anuradhapura, which is one of UNESCO's World Heritage Sites. In the summer of 1994 four members of Bradford University, Dr Robin Coningham, Mr Rob Janaway, Steven Cheshire and Gary Dooney, spent six weeks working at the site with members of the Government Department of Archaeology and the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka..

Home to the royal court

Anuradhapura or 'the city of Anura', is the earliest capital of Sri Lanka and was home to the royal court from 437 BC to 1017 AD. However it is not only a city, but one of the great centres of Buddhism in South Asia visited by thousands of pilgrims and tourists each year. The site consists of a central ten metre high mound covered in jungle, marking the old urban core, surrounded by over thirty square kilometres of Buddhist monasteries and huge reservoirs. Amongst the most spectacular of the Buddhist monuments are four great stupas, solid domes of earth and brick built over a Buddhist relic, which reach heights of over eighty metres and dominate the landscape of paddy fields and coconut trees.