Australian Gourmet Traveler visits Galle Fort

Every evening before dusk, residents of Sri Lanka's ancient walled fort of Galle gather on the surf-pounded ramparts to promenade. It's a passeggiata of sorts, with children playing cricket or flying kites on a small green while their parents serve curry dinners from the back of rickety vans. In the narrow streets of the old town the sticky heat smells of salt and frangipani, while a jangle of auto-rickshaws joins the call to prayer sounded from the town's small domed mosque, a curiosity in this predominantly Buddhist country.

The UNESCO heritage-listed Galle Fort lies at the heart of Sri Lanka's magical south-west coast, It's a sweep of paradise that found itself on the frontline of the devastating Boxing Day tsunami.

The beaches that unfurl towards nearby Weligama and Tangalle are again dotted here and there with painted boats, while stilt fishermen perch precariously on slender poles above the surf. The jungle hinterland crowding the coastal road still sounds of monkeys, who delight in clattering across the tiled roofs of the old Dutch villas.

For the first-time visitor, Galle raises the question: why didn't someone tell me about this place sooner? A handful of savvy expats has cottoned on and is busily establishing this pretty town as just about the smartest new holiday spot on the planet. There are only a handful of narrow streets in a fort ringed by walls 20m thick and atop a small south-facing promontory skirted with coral reefs. Visiting in the '70s, Paul Theroux described the "rufous gold" of the luminous sunsets and the "palm-scented ocean".

Abutting a more ancient trading port (in the 1840s, the British Colonial Secretary Sir James Emerson Tennent detailed the rather fraught procedure of loading elephants for export), Galle Fort was established by the Portuguese in the 1500s, the Dutch rebuilt it a century later (when it served as HQ for the Dutch East India Company), and it was passed into British hands in 1796. The streets retain their Dutch flavour, however. They're lined with old spice warehouses and merchants' homes bearing heavy shuttered windows and tiled roofs. The narrow frontages are deceptive, frequently concealing very large two and three-storey houses with colonnaded courtyards, grand salons and rear terraces with ocean views.

For Europeans who've purchased a house here, town life is low key. There's the passeggiata, of course, or coffee at Pedlar's Inn. Restaurants are rare. The best food in town, and indeed some of the best in the country, is to be had at the Galle Fort Hotel, where Ong's sensational Straits Chinese dishes star, and the mouth-watering sorbets are the perfect pick-me-up on a steamy May evening. Every evening, expats and travellers, dressed down in sarongs and tee-shirts, gather on the terrace for cocktails, while resident dogs Max, Chen and tsunami-orphan Bunty doze beneath the tables.

Shopping is a surprising pleasure. During the Fort's heyday in the late 1800s the streets and shops were thronged, as P&O passengers crowded the New Oriental Hotel, tea traders and French packet boats stopped by and merchant vessels raced through from Australia to catch the London wool sales.

The pace is less hectic these days and the Fort is so compact that shopping is more of a stroll to the corner store than a full-blown excursion

The best buys are the gems and semi-precious stones expertly cut by fourth and fifth-generation traders and mounted in traditional and modern settings (the Cartier and Bvlgari copies are convincing or you can design your own). We're talking rocks here, some the size of quail eggs, even fists, all ridiculously cheap and eagerly sought after by designers in Europe. (The history of the local gem trade dates back centuries. It's said King Solomon acquired his jewels in Galle