Hantane Tea Estate

The Hantane tea estate occupies the plateau and slopes directly above Kandy, making it one of the most accessible tea plantations to the city. The estate is visible from several points in the town, and a road winds up from Peradeniya through the tea gardens to the top of the ridge. Visitors can walk the estate trails, watch the leaf-picking (in season), and visit the factory where the tea is processed.

The factory tour — watching the withering, rolling, fermenting, and drying of fresh leaves — is the most interesting part and is offered most mornings on weekdays. A drive up the Hantane road at any time of day passes through some of the best tea scenery within easy reach of Kandy.

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A story
The Hantane plateau above Kandy was among the first areas in Sri Lanka where coffee was planted commercially, in the 1820s. When a fungal disease — Hemileia vastatrix, coffee leaf rust — destroyed virtually the entire coffee crop across Ceylon between 1869 and 1880, the British planters who remained switched to tea. The switch happened so completely and so quickly that within twenty years there was almost no commercial coffee left on the island. Sri Lanka, which had been a major coffee exporter, became a tea exporter almost overnight.

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