Sri Lanka’s Pekoe Trail tops Times’ World’s Greatest Places of 2025 list

Grab your suitcase and your passport — TIME has just released its list of the world’s 100 greatest places to visit in 2025.

The team of editors at the New York-based news magazine has selected remarkable destinations and thrilling new experiences travelers need to know about, as The Pekoe Trail in Sri Lanka’s Central Highlands, features in the list among everything from resorts to cruises to museums, restaurants and national parks worldwide.

The Pekoe Trail
Central Highlands, Sri Lanka

Up in the Sri Lankan highlands, a 19th-century transport network for tea is now conveying adventurers to remote communities and businesses. The 186-mile Pekoe Trail—completed last March and named for the high-grade black tea produced on many Sri Lankan estates—is the country’s first long-distance walking path, linking thousands of colonial-era dirt roads and railway tracks built by the British for exporting tea. 

Though local companies have led trekking tours along parts of the route for years, this is the first time all 22 sections have been connected as a single trail, an initiative led by Sri Lanka-based sustainability consultant Miguel Cunat and funded by the European Union and the U.S. Agency for International Development. 

For hikers, the path offers an intimate look at Sri Lanka’s diverse landscape and tea-entwined history: it unfurls from the mist-cloaked Hanthana mountains near Kandy, through tea plantations, eucalyptus forests, tiny villages and the holy peak of Sri Pada, to Nuwara Eliya, the country’s tea capital. A new app highlights nearby landmarks, segment details, emergency information, and more. 

Each stage takes about three to six hours to hike, depending on its difficulty, and traversing the entire route can take weeks. Charming stays—including Teardrop Hotels’ contemporary-chic bungalows and Uga Escapes’ newly launched Halloowella, a six-suite estate formerly owned by a British army major that has been redesigned by celebrated Sri Lankan architect Channa Daswatte—ensure that hikers are well-fed and rested along the way.

--Times--