Malabe

Malabe is a suburb in the Colombo District, administered by the Kaduwela Municipal Council, on the New Kandy Road about 10 km from central Colombo. It borders Athurugiriya, Kaduwela, Battaramulla, Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte and Hokandara, and its name comes from the classical Sinhala "Maha Lahamba", meaning "the large forest".

The area is best known as an education and IT hub. The Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT) has run its 25-acre Malabe campus here since 1999, alongside Horizon Campus and the CINEC Maritime Campus, and MillenniumIT — an information-technology firm later linked to the London Stock Exchange Group — was founded in Malabe in 1996. The government-run Dr Neville Fernando Teaching Hospital, taken over from a private operator on 1 August 2017, is the area's main hospital.

The New Kandy Road runs through the centre of Malabe, with the Athurugiriya and Kothalawala interchanges of the Outer Circular Expressway (E02), opened in 2014, close by. There is no railway station in Malabe; the nearest is Pannipitiya, several kilometres away, and bus route 177 connects the area to Kollupitiya via Kaduwela. A light rail line planned from Fort to Malabe was cancelled in September 2020; a revival was announced in December 2022, but funding commitments had not been finalised by the most recent reports found.

Malabe Boys' School, established in 1987, and Horizon College International serve local families, and everyday shopping runs through Cargills Food City, Sathosa and a weekly market near the town centre. With several campuses close together, the area has a large student population alongside long-term residents, and daily life is built around the SLIIT/CINEC corridor as much as around the older town centre.

Commercial office space has been built out around the IT park designation, including a multi-storey office building by International Construction Consortium, and the teaching hospital has continued to expand since the 2017 takeover. New residential developments in Malabe are listed further down this page.

The concentration of campuses and IT employers tends to make Malabe a common search area for students, lecturers and IT professionals working near SLIIT, CINEC or the Malabe IT park corridor, as well as for landlords targeting student rentals.