Baththalangunduwa Island

Baththalangunduwa is an elongated sandy island located in Portugal Bay in Puttalam District, Sri Lanka. It is popular among tourists as an ideal place for beach camping. It is a fishing island and there is difficulties in finding drinking water. There is about an hour-long boat trip from Kalpitiya to Baththalangunduwa island.

Baththalangunduwa island extends about 16.0 km along from south to north and has a maximum width varying between 680-700 m from east to west (Kodippili et al., 2017). It is one of the few inhabited islands to the north of Puttalam Lagoon.

 

The island has no gravel or tar roads, but narrow sandy paths lined with houses created a convoluted network of routes. Sandy beaches, sand dunes, scrub vegetation and mangrove patches are found in the middle and to the northward of the island (Kodippili et al., 2017). Bar Reef, the marine sanctuary is located a few kilometres west and to the northwest of the island and the offshore named Pearl  Banks is popular for seeing marine mammals such as whales, dugongs, porpoises and dolphins (Kodippili et al., 2017). The island is lined on the east by Portuguese bay, a well-developed seagrasses cover (Kodippili et al., 2017).

The Baththalangunduwa island experiences periods of low rainfall, intense sunlight and strong seasonal winds (Abeywardana et al., 2018). The average temperature is 28.2 °C and the average rainfall ranges between 750-1,125 mm per year (Abeywardana et al., 2018; Kodippili et al., 2017). The wind climate of the island is characterized mainly by two monsoons, the northeast monsoon (May to September) and the southeast monsoon (December to February). Of these two, the southwest monsoon has the strongest winds (Kodippili et al., 2017).

Location Map

This page was last updated on 6 May 2022
For a complete tourist map follow this link: Lankapradeepa Tourist Map