Auberge de Castille

Where it sits. The Auberge de Castille closes the southern end of Castille Place, the highest point in Valletta at roughly 56 metres above the sea, and it does so with more confidence than any other building on the island. The square in front of it is one of the few genuinely level open spaces inside the walls, and the auberge presents a long two-storey facade of honey-coloured globigerina limestone across the whole width of it. To one side stands St James Cavalier, the huge circular gun platform that guards the land front. Behind it, the ground drops away to the Upper Barrakka Gardens and then straight down about sixty metres to the Grand Harbour. Standing in the square you are simultaneously at the summit of the city and on top of its defences.

What an auberge was. The Order of St John divided its membership into langues, national groupings that each maintained a communal residence in the capital where their knights ate, slept and conducted business. Valletta had eight. The langue of Castile, León and Portugal was among the wealthiest, and its head, the Grand Chancellor, ranked high in the Order's hierarchy. Girolamo Cassar built the first Auberge de Castille here in the 1570s as part of the initial furnishing of the new city, in the plain, heavy manner he used throughout Valletta.

The rebuilding. What stands today is not Cassar's building. Between about 1741 and 1745, under the flamboyant Portuguese Grand Master Manuel Pinto da Fonseca, the auberge was rebuilt or comprehensively refaced in full Baroque, a commission usually attributed to Andrea Belli, with the Maltese architect Domenico Cachia also credited by some historians. The result is the most theatrical facade in Malta. A broad flight of steps rises to a central doorway framed by paired columns, above which sits a marble bust of Pinto himself surrounded by carved trophies of arms, drums, standards and cannon barrels, under a broken segmental pediment. The wall surface is deeply modelled: rusticated quoins at the corners, heavy window surrounds alternating triangular and curved pediments, and a strongly projecting cornice that throws a hard shadow line across the whole front in the afternoon. The composition is symmetrical but not static, and the local limestone takes the carving with unusual crispness before it weathers.

A working government building. The Order lost the island in 1798 and the auberge passed through a long institutional career. The British Army used it as headquarters for the Malta garrison, and the building was damaged during the aerial bombardment of 1940 to 1942, then repaired. Since 1972 it has housed the Office of the Prime Minister of Malta, and it remains a functioning ministry rather than a museum. There is no public interior access. This matters for planning: the auberge is something to look at and photograph, not to tour, and the whole visit is fifteen minutes unless you are attending a state occasion. Police stand at the door, and the square is occasionally closed for ceremonial arrivals.

What is around it. Castille Place is the hinge of the upper city, and almost everything within two minutes' walk is worth the detour. St James Cavalier next door was converted in 2000 into an arts centre with a theatre-in-the-round and a cinema, built into the vaulted chambers of the gun platform. The Upper Barrakka Gardens are directly behind, with the Saluting Battery on the terrace below and the panoramic Barrakka Lift dropping to the harbour. Renzo Piano's Parliament House and the open-air Pjazza Teatru Rjal are a hundred metres downhill toward City Gate, so the square is also where twenty-first-century Valletta meets the eighteenth. The contrast between the milled, pitted stone of the Parliament blocks and the carved Baroque of the auberge is the clearest architectural conversation on the island.

Getting there and timing. From City Gate, walk in and bear right along Girolamo Cassar Avenue past Parliament; it is a level three-minute walk with no steps, which makes this one of the easier corners of Valletta to reach. Almost all island bus routes terminate just outside the gate. The facade faces roughly north, so it sits in flat light for much of the day; the best modelling comes in the last hour before sunset when low sun rakes across the cornice and the carved trophies above the door, and again after dark when it is floodlit and the square is nearly empty. Photographs from the far corner near St James Cavalier get the whole elevation without wide-angle distortion.