Lower Barrakka Gardens

Where it sits. The Lower Barrakka Gardens occupy the top of St Christopher Bastion at the far northeastern end of Valletta, a few hundred metres from Fort St Elmo and roughly a kilometre from City Gate along Republic Street. Where the Upper Barrakka looks down the length of the Grand Harbour toward the dockyard, the Lower Barrakka looks the other way, out through the harbour mouth: Ricasoli Point and Fort Ricasoli on the opposite headland, the long arm of the St Elmo breakwater with its arched bridge, and open Mediterranean beyond. This is the seaward end of the composition, and it is the better of the two gardens for watching ships actually enter and leave.

The temple in the middle. The garden is dominated by a small neoclassical monument that people routinely mistake for a Roman ruin. It is a peripteral temple, a rectangular cella ringed by Doric columns carrying a plain entablature, raised in 1810 as a memorial to Sir Alexander Ball. Ball was a Royal Navy captain who had served under Nelson, led the Maltese insurgents in the blockade that forced the French garrison out of Valletta in 1800, and then governed the island as its first British Civil Commissioner until his death in 1809. He was genuinely popular with the Maltese, which is not something that can be said of every colonial administrator, and the monument was substantially funded by public subscription. His remains were later interred at Fort St Elmo nearby. The temple frames the harbour mouth when photographed from the garden's inland corner, and its stone glows in the morning sun.

The planting. The garden itself is formal and compact: gravel walks, low clipped hedges, geometric beds, palms, ficus and oleander, with a small pergola and benches along the harbour parapet. It is quieter and less visited than the Upper Barrakka, partly because it is at the wrong end of the city for the cruise-ship walking routes and partly because the streets leading to it drop steeply in steps. That relative emptiness is the main reason to make the walk. There is usually shade, always a breeze off the harbour mouth, and often nobody at the railing. Local families use it as an ordinary neighbourhood garden in the early evening, which gives it a different atmosphere from the Upper Barrakka's constant turnover of tour groups. Immediately below and behind it stands the Sacra Infermeria, the Order's sixteenth-century hospital with its 155-metre Great Ward, one of the longest unsupported halls in Europe when it was built and now the Mediterranean Conference Centre.

The Siege Bell. On the bastion terrace immediately beside the garden stands the Siege Bell War Memorial, unveiled in 1992 by Queen Elizabeth II on the fiftieth anniversary of the award of the George Cross. It commemorates the roughly seven thousand servicemen and civilians killed in the siege of Malta between 1940 and 1943. The design places a large bronze bell in an open limestone belfry at the edge of the bastion, and below it, on a low platform overlooking the water, a recumbent bronze figure of a serviceman laid out on a bier, the work of the British sculptor Michael Sandle. The bell is rung daily at noon. The figure is deliberately unheroic and is more affecting than any of the triumphal monuments elsewhere in the city.

What you can see from the parapet. Working from left to right across the water: the breakwater built by the British in the first decade of the twentieth century, with the lighthouse at its head and the footbridge that replaced the original span destroyed during the Italian naval raid of July 1941; Fort Ricasoli, the Order's largest fort, begun in 1670, now derelict and used extensively as a film location; Rinella and Kalkara Creek behind it; and directly opposite, the tip of Birgu with Fort St Angelo. Cruise ships and container vessels pass close under the bastion on their way in, and the pilot boats work the mouth constantly. Below the garden wall, the water is deep right up to the rock.

Getting there and timing. The simplest route is to walk the full length of Republic Street from City Gate to the far end, then turn right; allow twenty minutes at an unhurried pace. The alternative approach along the Marsamxett side or up from the Grand Harbour involves long flights of steps, so the Republic Street route is the gentler one. Entry is free and the gardens are open all day. Mornings give the best light through the harbour mouth and the emptiest benches; come a few minutes before twelve if you want the bell. Combining this with Fort St Elmo and the National War Museum, five minutes further on, makes a coherent half-day at the seaward end of the city.