Taprobane Island Weligama, Sri Lanka

Taprobane Island, initially called “Galduwa”(“Rock Island”, is a private island with one mansion, found off the southern coast of Weligama of Sri Lanka. Weligama is a popular beach resort on the south coast of Sri Lanka and a large number of tourist resorts to this coastal town for their Sri Lanka beach holiday. Weligama is also popular for surfing among travellers. The waves in Weligeama are believed to be very suitable for novice surfers and many dozens of surfing schools are dotted along the beach in Weligama. The best time to visit Weligama is from November through April when the coast of Weligama is spared from the monsoon wind.

The island was renamed after the old Greek word for Sri Lanka, by its generally well-known proprietor, Maurice Talvande (who styled himself as “Count de Mauny Talvande”), who located it around 1925 after a long quest for a natural paradise. He constructed its villa and replanted the island to make a confidential Eden. The islet gave to the American creator and author Paul Bowles and afterwards, the Sri Lankan-born previous Unites Nations Chief Prosecutor Sir Desmond Lorenz de Silva before it came to the responsibility for Australian finance manager Geoffrey Dobbs.

Important individuals who remained on Taprobane include Dutch author Peter ten Hoopen, who spent a month there in 1984 during the civil riots on the mainland, as well as Kylie Minogue, who made a melody about the island motivated by her visit named “Taprobane (Extraordinary Day)”. It inspired Jason Kouchak to compose “Dark Island” in his 1999 collection Watercolours.

The author Robin Maugham, who visited the island as a young fellow, and during the 1970s, considered the remarkable magnificence and congruity of the estate had become compromised after de Mauny’s passing by dividing and the deficiency of his furnishings and fittings, and that the actual area had been despoiled by the development of another street along the mainland beach. From that point forward, and especially after the 2004 tsunami, a significant further improvement in the mainland has happened. While Arthur C. Clarke’s original novel The Fountain of Paradise happens in “Taprobane”, the setting is unmistakably Sri Lanka, not this island.