Rumassala

Rumassala, known to Portuguese as Buona Vista, is the subject of many legends. It is featured in Valmiki Ramayana, where the monkey chief of Rama Hanuman is dispatched to fetch a medicinal plant “Sansevi” to save the life of wounded Rama, being unable to find it instead brought a part of the Himalayan mountains on which it was said to grow. He dropped a chunk at Unawatuna ('here it fell') to form the present mountain, where many medicinal plants still grow.

There is a major magnetic anomaly near Unawatuna, which Arthur C. Clarke attributes to a meteorite strike, and it is said that satellites lose their orbits with unusual frequency overhead.

The Portuguese had a dreadful reputation in Sri Lanka as looters and pirates, and are said to have given false light signals from Rumassala to lure unsuspecting Arab trading ships onto the rocks.

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