The school stands on ground that was won, not simply given.
Before Ranabima Royal College had a single classroom, Gannoruwa had a battle — the last one the Kingdom of Kandy would ever fight, and the last the Portuguese would ever wage on this island. The college takes its name, its ground, and part of its purpose from what happened here.
A young king, a broken treaty
at the time of battle
In 1635, Rajasinghe II came to the throne of Kandy and immediately began courting the Dutch as a counterweight to Portuguese power on the island — the third and final European contest for the Kandyan Kingdom in as many generations.
The Portuguese Captain-General, Diogo de Melo de Castro, moved to provoke him: seizing an elephant gifted to a merchant of the king’s court. Rajasinghe answered in kind, seizing two of Melo’s own horses. It was enough. Melo mustered his army and marched on Kandy.
The city he found was empty. The Kandyans had withdrawn into the surrounding jungle, leaving the capital to be sacked and burned — and leaving Melo’s army to begin its long march back toward Colombo, unaware that its route home had already been sealed.
Two forces, one narrow ground
What met at Gannoruwa was deeply uneven on paper — and decisive in practice.
Kingdom of Kandy
Sinhalese ForcesPrince Vijayapala
Portuguese Empire
Colombo Expeditionary Force5,000 Lascarin auxiliaries
* Figure recorded in the Sinhala chronicle Mandaram Puwatha; likely an overstatement by contemporary military-historical estimates.
How the battle unfolded
The march begins
Diogo de Melo de Castro advances from Colombo with his full force, entering the kingdom via Balana and finding it eerily undefended.
Danture, Walagama, Dehideniya
The Portuguese column pushes through the outer kingdom unopposed, growing bolder as no resistance appears — a silence that was tactical, not absent.
An empty capital
Melo’s army reaches Kandy to find the city evacuated. They sack and burn it, then turn back toward Colombo — the mission, in their eyes, already complete.
The road home is sealed
At Gannoruwa, the Kandyan army — which had shadowed the Portuguese the entire march — closes every avenue of retreat. The hunters become the hunted.
Palm Sunday
The Sinhalese army attacks. By the day’s end, only around 33 Portuguese soldiers remain alive. It is the last battle the Portuguese will ever fight against the Kandyan Kingdom.
358 years later, the same ground was chosen again
When the Central Province opened a new provincial school at Gannoruwa on 2 March 1996, it did not treat the site as a blank plot of land. The date of opening was set deliberately to fall on the anniversary of the Kandyan Convention — and the school’s name was drawn straight from what the ground itself had witnessed.
Sri Lankans have long remembered this land for its victories over invading forces, giving it the old name jaya bima — “land of victories.” The college’s own name, Ranabima, carries that memory forward in a single word: battlefield.
What still surrounds the site
The land that once held an army now holds a school of over 1,280 students — but the setting that made Gannoruwa a natural place to make a stand still defines it. The Hanthana range still rises behind the grounds; the Mahaweli still runs its bend along the boundary.
The college shares its immediate surroundings with the Royal Botanical Gardens, the University of Peradeniya, and the Department of Agriculture’s research station — a cluster of institutions that has quietly made this stretch of Gannoruwa one of the Central Province’s most concentrated centres of learning.
- Nearest townPeradeniya, ~2 km
- Kandy city centre~6 km
- Elevation contextHanthana foothills
- WaterwayMahaweli River (bank)
“The heads of the fallen were piled before the king — a brutal end to the last battle Kandy would ever need to fight. What remains on that ground now is not a monument to war, but a school built in its memory.”Ranabima Royal College — Heritage Archive