Dwejra

What is there now. The Azure Window no longer exists above water. The limestone arch that stood at Dwejra on Gozo's west coast, near the village of San Lawrenz, collapsed into the sea at about 9:40 in the morning on 8 March 2017, after a night of heavy storms. The pillar went first and pulled the horizontal slab down with it, and nothing at all was left showing above the surface. Visitors still come to Dwejra in large numbers; what they find is a headland with a gap in it, a spectacular coastline, and — for divers — a boulder field on the seabed that has quietly become one of the better dive sites in the Maltese islands.

How it formed and how it went. The arch measured roughly 28 metres high with a span of around 25 metres. It began as a notch cut by waves at the base of a cliff, which opened into a joint, then a cave, then an arch once the roof stabilised — and reached the end of that natural sequence when the roof grew heavier than the pillar could carry. It is not mentioned in 17th- and 18th-century accounts of Dwejra, which already describe nearby Fungus Rock in detail, so it probably formed in the 19th century; the earliest known depiction is an 1824 illustration showing it in the background behind Dwejra Tower, and the earliest photographs date from about 1879. Large sections of the top slab fell away between the 1980s and the 2000s, widening the opening; another rockfall came in March 2013. A geotechnical report that year judged the arch relatively stable for some years yet while warning that falls would continue. In December 2016 an emergency order banned walking on it under a €1,500 fine. The order was not enforced, and people were still crossing the slab days before it fell.

On screen. Dwejra played Essos. The Dothraki wedding of Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo in the first episode of Game of Thrones, filmed in 2010, was staged on the shore here, with the arch in the background — the sequence in which Daenerys is given the three petrified dragon eggs. The shoot generated a lasting controversy on Gozo when a subcontractor damaged a protected ecosystem at the site, and the incident is part of the reason Malta did not return for later seasons. The arch had a much longer film career before that: it appears in Clash of the Titans (1981), alongside Fungus Rock and Fort St. Elmo, and in The Count of Monte Cristo (2002). It also turns up in the Tamil film Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa (2010). Because the arch is gone, every one of those frames is now the only way to see it standing.

What Dwejra still offers. The arch was never the whole of this coast. The Inland Sea is a shallow lagoon connected to the open Mediterranean by a natural tunnel through the cliff, and small boats run through the tunnel when the swell allows, emerging under vertical rock. Fungus Rock, the flat-topped islet at the mouth of Dwejra Bay, was guarded by the Knights for a parasitic plant they believed to be medicinal, and access to it was a capital matter. Dwejra Tower of 1652 stands on the headland above. The Blue Hole, a natural shaft in the shore platform that opens sideways into the sea through an underwater arch, is one of the Mediterranean's better-known dives and is where most divers now enter to reach the collapse debris.

How the site is managed. The government stated after the collapse that the formation will not be rebuilt. An open call for ideas produced a proposal for a hotel in a nearby quarry, dropped in 2018, and a later Russian design for a mirrored steel structure called The Heart of Malta, which drew mixed reactions and has not been built. In 2019 a new street in San Lawrenz was named Triq it-Tieqa tad-Dwejra in the arch's memory. The nearest surviving natural arch on Gozo, the Wied il-Mielaħ Window, stands about 3.7 kilometres to the north-east and is far less visited.

Getting there and timing. Buses reach Dwejra from Victoria in about twenty-five minutes; drivers park on the rough ground above the bay. The site is exposed and treeless, so summer visits reward an early start or the last two hours of the day, when the west-facing cliffs take the whole sunset. Winter storms are worth watching from a safe distance — the same swell that finished the arch still breaks hard against the platform, and the rock edges are undercut and unfenced.