Travel Guide · North & East
Wild Ponies and a Lonely Baobab: Delft Island
Off the tip of the Jaffna peninsula, out where the lagoon meets the open sea, lies one of the strangest and most haunting places in Sri Lanka: Delft Island, known by its Tamil name Neduntheevu. It’s a flat, windswept island of coral and limestone, ringed by shallow turquoise water and scattered with the relics of everyone who has ever passed through — the Cholas, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British — and it feels utterly unlike anywhere else in the country. Few foreign travellers make it out here, which is exactly part of the appeal.
The island’s most famous residents are its wild ponies. Generations ago the colonial powers — first the Portuguese, then the Dutch — kept horses here on a stud farm, and when the farm was abandoned the animals were simply left to fend for themselves. Their descendants, a small herd of hardy wild ponies, still roam the scrub and the grazing land, one of the only populations of feral horses in this part of the world. Seeing them grazing against the flat coral landscape, with the sea behind, is the image people carry home from Delft.
Stranger still is the baobab. Among the ruins stands an ancient baobab tree — a species native to Africa, not Asia — its swollen, bottle-shaped trunk completely out of place on a Sri Lankan island. It was almost certainly brought across the Indian Ocean centuries ago by Arab or Portuguese traders, a living souvenir of the old maritime trade routes, and it has stood here ever since. There’s something quietly extraordinary about a tree that crossed an ocean to grow on a coral island at the bottom of the Jaffna peninsula.
The whole island is a curiosity cabinet of small wonders, and I’ll take you between them. Its lanes and field boundaries are walled with bleached coral, dry-stacked into low fences that glow white in the sun. There’s a Dutch pigeon house — a tall colonial dovecote once used to send messages — and a curious “growing stone” the islanders say slowly increases in size. You’ll find the crumbling remains of a fort, a giant footprint pressed into the rock, and the lonely ruin known as the Queen’s Tower. None of it is grand; all of it is memorable, precisely because it’s so unexpected and so untouched.
Getting to Delft is half the adventure, and it’s why a guide and a plan really help. From Jaffna you drive out across a chain of causeways linking the islands of the peninsula to the jetty at Kurikadduwan, and from there a ferry crosses to Delft. The ferry is a government service — limited in capacity and in the number of daily sailings — so it pays to start early and to know the schedule, which is exactly the sort of thing I handle so you’re not left stranded on a jetty. Once on the island, you’ll need transport to reach the scattered sights, and that too is best arranged ahead.
Set your expectations the right way and Delft is unforgettable. This is not a polished day out with cafés and facilities; it’s remote, sparsely populated, often hot and exposed, with little shade and few services. You come for the wild ponies, the ocean-crossed baobab, the coral walls and the sheer strange beauty of a place that history forgot — not for comfort. Bring water, sun protection and a sense of adventure, and it becomes one of those days you find yourself describing to people for years.
The islanders themselves are part of the experience — a small, resilient Tamil community living off fishing, palmyra and a little farming on a hard, beautiful island at the very edge of the country. There’s a simple Hindu temple, a scattering of old wells, and a giant footprint pressed into the rock that local legend ties to gods and giants. Life here moves at the pace of the ferry and the tides, and a few hours in it is a quiet lesson in how little people actually need to make a home.
From the driver’s seat: treat Delft as a full day out of Jaffna, start early to catch the ferry and the cooler hours, and carry everything you’ll need — water, snacks, sun cover — because the island has very little. It’s the natural companion to a couple of days in Jaffna, and for the right traveller — the curious one who likes the road less taken — it’s the most memorable single day in the whole of the north.
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