The first time he heard the call of a slender loris pierce the dark night in Jetwing Vil Uyana, Chaminda Jayasekara stopped in his tracks. As a child growing up in a village in rural Polonnaruwa in central Sri Lanka this was a familiar sound – he just never expected to hear it here. After all, he was standing on the grounds of a hotel in the dry zone, not on the borders of a jungle. In wonder, Chaminda gazed up into the trees where he now knew tiny primates with long, slender limbs and large, saucer-like eyes moved cautiously through the lattice of branches. 

It was 2010 and the hotel had been operational for four years while Chaminda, the resident naturalist, had been employed there for just two. The architect, Sunela Jayewardene, had imagined the property – which had begun as an exhausted patch of farmland – would be transformed into a wetland. She warned the owners that this place would take years to realise its full potential. 

Come 2020, Chaminda, now both in-house naturalist and assistant manager, has led over 1500 night walks around their land. Over these 10 years, he has meticulously recorded and photographed the activities of their resident lorises, creating a record as unique as it is extensive. These rare arboreal primates are endangered, threatened by shrinking habitats across the island and teams from as far off as the Europe and America have come to study them. 

Chaminda has recorded 21 babies in the last decade and while he can identify some individuals, the exact numbers have been hard to pin down. He is also gaining valuable insights into the territorial instincts and the feeding behaviour of his beloved lorises, including that these reported insectivores are actually omnivores with a taste for small birds and young squirrels. 

Chaminda can’t wait to see what the next ten years will bring, as around him Jetwing Vil Uyana continues to evolve and more and more animals move in. “This is not a hotel,” he says, “It’s a habitat.” 

How to build a wetland from scratch

Sunela will be the first to admit that she thinks about the environment before the buildings, which makes her an unusual architect. Even to her eyes though, there was little to recommend the 25 acres she was shown all those years ago. “It was ghastly. It was distressed, abandoned paddy land,” she remembers. “It had been cultivated and cultivated; chemicals had been dumped onto it to ensure high yield.” The expert they brought in said this soil was in the worst shape he had seen in his entire career.  But where others saw a sterile, exploited landscape, Sunela saw a wetland. 

The saving grace, as far as she was concerned, was a small canal that ran along the property. “I knew that the land was positioned at the end of a cascade system, which could be trusted to provide water. Standing there, I had a sense of what this land could be.” Sunela designed a concept anchored to a wetland system with lakes, reed beds and forest combining to form a private nature reserve. She was inspired by vernacular design, and planned to embed villas into this wetland which would mimic the traditional watch huts on stilts built by farmers deep in the Sigiriya jungles. From the villas, guests would be immersed in the beauty and uniqueness of individual habitats – water, paddy field, forest, marsh and garden – which in turn would be home to wildlife. 

Sunela worked closely with experts who understood these landscapes intimately, commissioning one to engage with the existing cascade system and build two self-sustaining water bodies, and others who could plant indigenous species appropriate to each habitat. “I wanted to re-wild the land, and I knew that you could only do that with indigenous plants,” she says. 

An invitation to animals 

As the arid landscape was transformed the animals began to move in. Their first visitor was a small crocodile. The hotel was still under construction, but she didn’t seem to mind. 

Early on, they brought in experts in the field who began a survey of flora and fauna. The original assessment during construction revealed 12 species of mammals, 29 species of birds, 24 species of butterflies, four species of fish and three species of amphibian and reptiles. 

By last year, those numbers have changed dramatically. 

A more recent survey logged 27 species of mammals, 148 kinds of birds, 51 species of butterflies, and 44 species of amphibians and reptiles. (A fish survey is due at the end of this year, and likely to throw up equally encouraging numbers.) The team is particularly proud to note that this includes not just the loris, but also the jungle and fishing cats, and the rusty spotted cat as well as a small population of Eurasian otters – all species under threat from habitat destruction in Sri Lanka. 

In more than one way, Jetwing Vil Uyana is a demonstration of how animals and humans can co-exist. The small cats for instance, love the paddy fields where the humans harvest a crop of indigenous rice. Across the board, the animals are at ease here in a way that was unimaginable all those years ago: the crocodile likes to bask near the lobby, and the otters have been known to run through it; the lorises are in the trees within hailing distance. “The animals here are completely relaxed because they know they are not under any threat,” says Chaminda.

A dream decades in the making

Jetwing Vil Uyana now needs very little in the way of intervention. It is constantly evolving and more than half wild. However, this takes deliberate investment. One-third of the proceeds from nature walks led by Chaminda go toward a conservation fund, which organizes awareness programmes for locals at the library and the village temple as well as supports other small conservation efforts outside its borders.  

Chaminda believes what they have accomplished would not be possible without the unstinting and continuing support offered by Shiromal and Hiran Cooray, who are the children of Jetwing’s founder Herbet Cooray. Their willingness to set aside land bookmarked for development and purchase new land instead, allowing the wilderness to take over seems prescient in retrospect, but at the time must have been a gamble. 

In a time where development continues to be hotly debated in Sri Lanka, here is a model that has become profitable precisely because it prioritised sustainability and conservation. Certainly, it has allowed them to curate a host of ever-expanding experiences at the property, including a night safari. 

The last time Chaminda took someone on one, they saw 14 jungle cats in two hours and almost every night brings a loris sighting without fail. Sunela likes to tease him that their work will not be complete until he can guarantee an otter sighting. Chaminda is confident that that will soon be the case.  14 years after it first opened its doors, Jetwing Vil Uyana is finally nearing completion.