World's End, Horton Plains

Horton Plains takes its English name from Sir Robert Wilmot-Horton, the British governor of Ceylon in the 1830s, though the plateau had long been known to local communities before colonial surveyors mapped it. Its cool, wet, high-altitude climate made it unsuitable for the tea and coffee plantations that transformed much of the surrounding hill country, which is a large part of why its cloud forest and grassland have survived largely intact.

The plains sit at the heart of Sri Lanka's central highlands and form the watershed for three of the island's major rivers — the Mahaweli, Kelani and Walawe — making the ecosystem here critical to water supply far beyond the park itself. The area was declared a national park in 1988 and, together with the surrounding highlands, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010 for its exceptional biodiversity and endemic species.

World's End itself, the sheer escarpment at the edge of the plateau, has long been a place of local legend as much as a hiking destination — a landscape that seems to end abruptly in mid-air, with the plains falling away toward the lowlands nearly a kilometre below.