Jetwing St Andrew’s

Jetwing St Andrew's occupies one of Nuwara Eliya's oldest addresses. The first building on the site went up in 1875 on land granted by the Crown to a British colonial civil servant, and it began life as a private residence before becoming the "Scots Club", a gathering place for the Scottish coffee and tea planters who had settled the surrounding hills. In 1891 the property was converted into a hotel under a German manager, Mr Humbert, and it has operated as one ever since — making it one of the longest-running hotels in Sri Lanka's hill country.

The building grew in stages rather than all at once. Between 1918 and 1919, under owner Arthur Edward Ephraums, a two-storey wing was added to the west along with dining facilities, a kitchen and a billiard room, giving the hotel much of the layout it still has today. Ownership passed through several hands over the following decades — the de Zilwa family from 1933, Gerald Milhuisen from 1976 — before the property joined the Jetwing Hotels group in 1987, which restored and now runs it. Touches of that long history remain on view, among them a snooker room that was originally a dance hall, and a snooker table reckoned to be over a century old, complete with its original ivory balls.

The hotel's setting is as much a part of its character as the building itself. It sits directly alongside the Nuwara Eliya Golf Course, and the pairing of manicured fairways, pine-edged hills and a grey stone colonial facade gives the property a distinctly Scottish air in the middle of Sri Lanka's tea country — the name itself nods to St Andrews, golf's home town. Public rooms keep the wood panelling, fireplaces and hunting-lodge furniture of the original clubhouse, and the atmosphere leans formal and old-fashioned rather than resort-casual.

The hotel also has a wartime chapter. During the Second World War it served as a rest and recreation centre for Allied servicemen, and in 1942 it took in survivors of HMS Hermes after the aircraft carrier was sunk by Japanese aircraft off the Sri Lankan coast. That mix of colonial-era grandeur and lived history is what distinguishes St Andrew's from the newer hill-country hotels around it: guests are staying inside a genuine 19th-century planter's clubhouse, not a modern building built to evoke one.

Nuwara Eliya itself sits at close to 1,900 metres above sea level, high enough to give the town a cool, often misty climate that earned it the nickname "Little England" under British rule, with mock-Tudor architecture, rose gardens and pine trees standing in for a home climate the planters had left behind. St Andrew's, with its golf-course lawns and clubhouse pedigree, sits squarely inside that inherited character, and today's 56 rooms and five suites, spread across two restaurants, let guests experience the town's colonial-era atmosphere from inside one of its original buildings rather than a later imitation of it.

Your transfer to Jetwing St Andrew’s

The nearest hotel on this site is The Grand Hotel in Grand Hotel Road, about 1.2 km away.