Verdala Palace

Where it sits. Verdala Palace stands on a low rise above the Buskett woodland, about three kilometres south of Rabat and roughly the same distance inland from the Dingli cliffs. The setting is deliberate and, for Malta, unusual: instead of a harbour or a walled town, the building looks out over the only substantial stand of trees on the island, with terraced valleys running away toward Girgenti and the sea cliffs beyond. The palace is square in plan with a tower at each corner and a dry ditch cut into the rock all the way round, which makes it read from a distance as a small fortress. It was never one. The ditch, the towers and the sparse lower windows are a hunting lodge dressed in military clothing, which was exactly the effect its owner wanted.

Verdalle's summer house. The palace was built in 1586 for Hugues Loubenx de Verdalle, Grand Master of the Order of St John and, unusually, also a cardinal. The architect was Girolamo Cassar, the Maltese designer responsible for most of the important early buildings of Valletta, including the conventual church of St John. Verdalle wanted a retreat within reach of the capital where he could hunt in the woodland he had planted below, and Cassar gave him a compact block of two principal floors over vaulted service levels, entered across a bridge over the ditch. A spiral staircase links the floors and a rock-cut cistern beneath collects the roof water — the standard Maltese solution to a summer with no rain.

The painted hall. The main room on the piano nobile carries a cycle of ceiling and wall paintings narrating the Grand Master's career, attributed to Filippo Paladini, a Florentine painter who worked in Malta and Sicily around the turn of the seventeenth century. The scheme is unashamedly a piece of self-presentation: embassies, ceremonies and elevations, painted for guests who were meant to be impressed. Together with the surviving chimneypieces and the vaulted ceilings, it is the reason the interior matters architecturally rather than merely as a curiosity.

Later lives. After the Order left in 1798 the palace passed through periods of neglect and improvisation — it served at times as a prison and as a store, and part of it was used for silk production. The British governors adopted it as a summer residence in the nineteenth century and restored it, which is when much of the present garden layout took shape. Since Malta became a republic it has been the summer residence of the President, used for official receptions and state hospitality, which is why the flag flies over it and why the gates are usually closed. The building has also acquired the island's best-known aristocratic ghost story, the Blue Lady, a noblewoman said to have been confined here and to have fallen from a window.

What you can actually see. This is the essential practical point: Verdala Palace is a working official residence and is not routinely open. It is opened to the public occasionally — typically on a small number of days a year, sometimes during heritage weekends or by arrangement for organised groups — and those dates are announced in advance. On any other day the visit consists of the exterior seen from the perimeter road and from the paths of Buskett below, which is genuinely worthwhile: the north face rising above the treetops is one of the more photogenic compositions in the Maltese interior, particularly in the late afternoon when the limestone warms and the pines are backlit. The chapel of St Anthony the Abbot stands nearby at the edge of the woodland. A second official residence sits a kilometre away in the same valley: the Girgenti palace, built in the early seventeenth century as the Inquisitor's summer retreat and now used by the Prime Minister, equally closed and equally visible from the surrounding tracks. The concentration is not accidental — the Girgenti valley has been where Malta's rulers went to escape the harbour for four hundred years, and the pattern has simply carried on under a republic.

Getting there and timing. From Rabat, buses 181 and 201 pass the Buskett approach, and the walk from Rabat's Saqqajja square takes about forty minutes on a road with limited pavement; drivers use the Buskett car parks and walk up. Combine it with the woodland, the cart ruts at Misraħ Għar il-Kbir a kilometre to the south-west, and the Dingli cliffs — all four sit within an easy half-day loop on foot. Spring is the season: the valley is green, the citrus in the old Grand Master's gardens is in fruit, and the light is even. In midsummer the same walk is exposed and hot, and the palace's shuttered facade gives nothing back.