Marsaxlokk

Where it sits. Marsaxlokk occupies the northwestern shore of Marsaxlokk Bay, the broad inlet that cuts into the southeastern corner of the Maltese main island about ten kilometres from Valletta. The name is a compound of two ordinary Maltese words — marsa, a harbour, and xlokk, the southeast, the quarter the sirocco blows from — so the village is, quite literally, the southeastern harbour. The bay behind it is the second great natural anchorage on the island after the Grand Harbour, closed on the east by the long low finger of the Delimara peninsula and on the west by the Kalafrana shore below Birżebbuġa. Roughly 4,200 people live here. The waterfront curves for the better part of a kilometre, backed by two- and three-storey houses of honey-coloured globigerina limestone, and faces southeast into the morning sun.

The boats are the point. Moored bow-out along the quay in ranks are the luzzi: double-ended wooden fishing boats with a high raked stem, painted in hard bands of yellow, red, blue and green, and carrying a pair of eyes on each side of the prow. The eyes are usually explained as an inheritance from Phoenician seafaring, and whatever their real ancestry, no fisherman here launches without them. The smaller, flatter-sterned kajjik works the inshore ground. The fleet still lands a genuine commercial catch — lampuki in the autumn run from late August to November, swordfish and tuna offshore in summer, octopus and bream year-round — which is why the harbour smells of diesel and brine rather than of sunscreen.

The market. On Sunday mornings the fish market takes over Xatt is-Sajjieda, the seafront street, with trestle tables of whole fish laid on ice from roughly seven o'clock until early afternoon. On every other day of the week the same stalls sell a general and largely tourist-facing range: lace, Maltese honey, qubbajt nougat, prickly-pear liqueur, sun hats. Locals buy fish on Sunday and largely stay away the rest of the time. Arriving before nine gives an hour of real trading before the coaches unload.

Deeper history than the postcards suggest. Phoenician and Carthaginian traders used this bay, and Roman harbour works have been traced along its edges. On the ridge above the eastern shore stands Tas-Silġ, one of the most stratified sanctuary sites in the central Mediterranean: a Neolithic temple reused as a Punic sanctuary of Astarte, then a Roman temple, then an early Christian basilica, then again in the Muslim period — under systematic excavation by an Italian mission since 1963. In May 1565 the Ottoman armada anchored in this bay before opening the Great Siege of Malta. In June 1798 Napoleon's forces put troops ashore here during the French takeover of the islands. The Knights answered the bay's exposure with Saint Lucian Tower of 1610, the largest of Grand Master Wignacourt's coastal towers, later absorbed into the British Fort San Lucian; the British added Fort Delimara opposite between 1876 and 1888.

The twentieth century, and one famous storm. Marsaxlokk only became a parish in its own right in the late nineteenth century, having until then been a maritime outpost of Żejtun; the parish church is dedicated to Our Lady of Pompeii. On 2 and 3 December 1989, weeks after the Berlin Wall opened, George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met in this bay for the summit at which they declared the Cold War over. A ferocious gale made ship-to-ship transfers impossible, so the talks were held aboard the Soviet liner Maxim Gorkiy riding at anchor here, and the meeting entered the record as the storm summit. The bay is working water still: the tall chimney of the Delimara power station rises on the far shore, and the gantry cranes of the Malta Freeport stand over Kalafrana to the west.

Getting there and timing. Direct buses from Valletta take about forty minutes; the terminus is on the front. Driving is straightforward but Sunday parking is genuinely difficult, and the small car parks behind the village fill by half past eight. The waterfront promenade is level and easy to walk, with restaurant terraces the length of it — this is one of the reliable places on the island for whole grilled fish and aljotta, the local fish broth thickened with garlic and rice. From the eastern end of the quay a coastal track runs out to Delimara, reaching St Peter's Pool in about forty minutes on foot. Spring and autumn are best; July and August are hot, glary and busy, and winter brings genuinely rough southeasterly weather straight into the bay.