The best sunrise spot in all of Sri Lanka. The sunrise over the jungle and then golden hour with Lion Rock right infront of you is incredible.
It's very busy pre-sunrise but also the rock is huge so loads of space for people to spread out. You may struggle to get your photo with Lion Rock in the background just after sunrise at the area just to the left of where you come up onto the rock.
If you head down to the right of pidurangala, when looking at Lion Rock, and put your phone on its max optical zoom (5x on our Iphone 15 Pro Max) and walk far from your subject, you can get a nice compressed photo of someone with Lion Rock in the background looking nice and big.
The worst time to come up is around 1 hour after sunrise. All the people from sunrise tours and hikes are heading down and its a big queue of people filing down the path blocking you from getting up.
Its gorgeous at sunset if you don't mind heading down in the dark too