Bogambara Prison

Kandy’s somewhat notorious Bogambara maximum-security prison, thought to have been modeled on the Bastille in Paris, closed its forbidding wooden doors to felons in 2013. But as part of the city’s historic architectural fabric, future plans for it include a boutique hotel, shopping mall and museum—of which the latter might include the prison gallows. This ‘death trap’ was the only one in the country where three death-row inmates could be executed simultaneously, and large crowds queued to see it when it was open to the public in 2014.