How crisis-hit Sri Lanka is gradually reviving its tourism business

By Arshia Dhar
26 June, 2023

How crisis-hit Sri Lanka is gradually reviving its tourism business

By Arshia Dhar
26 June, 2023

After four consecutive years of economic and social strife, Sri Lanka’s tourism sector, once having slowed to a crawl, is picking up again

There’s something about the emerald green of the Sri Lankan waters by its sunny beaches that never loses its charm; it’s like being on an eternal vacation, until it’s not.

In April 2019, the island nation’s Easter Sunday was marked by a series of deadly bombings across its capital city Colombo, where three luxury hotels and three churches were targeted by two local groups that had allegedly pledged allegiance to the ISIS. The attack had killed 270 people, while injuring over 500 during peak tourist season. It pushed Sri Lanka into the throes of an economic crisis that only exacerbated with the COVID-19 pandemic that followed merely months after, thereby decelerating an economy that has tourism for its backbone.

In April 2022, news emerged that the country had started to run out of fuel, with nation-wide power outages hurling it into literal darkness, coupled with inflation as steep as 50 per cent. Protests broke out on the streets; essential services shut down indefinitely as the state exhausted its foreign currency reserves that halted imports as well. In May last year, for the first time in its history, Sri Lanka defaulted on paying an interest on its foreign debt, following which, a month later, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigned in the face of swelling protests.

The Jami Ul-Alfar mosque in Sri Lanka's Colombo is built in the Indo-Saracenic style, and its construction was completed in 1909. Image: Salt In Our Hair

Sri Lanka's culture is a vibrant celebration of its local flora and fauna. Image: Unsplash

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