Postcard: Mount Lavinia Hotel & Beach, Ceylon

When I found this postcard I had no idea where it was - it just looked like a very nice place to visit. After researching the Mount Lavinia Hotel I discovered a wonderful romantic legend from the days of colonialism.

The Mount Lavinia Hotel wasn't always a hotel, it was actually the Governor's mansion of colonial Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. The first governor, Sir Thomas Maitland, acquired this point of land in the village of Galkissa and decided to build a residence there around 1805. At this time, Sir Thomas (often called King Tom) fell in love with a local girl named Lovina, a dancer who descended from Portugese and Sinhalese parents, and a member of the lowest caste in the community. Because of their disparate circumstances, Lovina and King Tom had to keep their romance a secret. But as a token of his esteem, King Tom named his new home atop the cliff "Mount Lavinia" in her honor.

Sir Thomas left Ceylon in 1811, but successive governors lived in the mansion through the 1840s. After this, the history gets a little unclear, until World War II when the building was used as a military hospital by the British Army. I'm not sure if it was made into a hotel before or after this, but it's still a hotel today...