Delft Island

Delft is the most remote of the Jaffna islands, about two hours by ferry from Kurikattuwan jetty, and it feels like stepping back several centuries. The island is flat and treeless, the vegetation scrubby, and the landscape dominated by ancient coral-stone walls built by the Dutch and Portuguese. Wild horses roam freely, descendants of animals left behind by the colonial powers and now thoroughly feral.

There is a Dutch fort, a Portuguese pillar (a navigation marker), and various other colonial remnants scattered across the island, as well as a remarkable banyan tree said to be among the oldest in Sri Lanka. The ferry runs a few times a week and the journey each way takes around two hours — which means you need to stay overnight or make peace with a very long day trip. The people who live here are warm hosts to the few travellers who make it out.

things to do sight island
A story
The horses of Delft are descended from animals left by the Dutch and Portuguese, who used the island as a stud farm during their respective periods of control. They've been feral for so long that they seem constitutively different from mainland horses — smaller, wilder, entirely indifferent to people. The coral-stone walls the colonial powers built are still there too, slowly dissolving back into the island.

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