Vittoriosa

Where it sits. Birgu occupies a low promontory on the south side of the Grand Harbour, with Fort St Angelo clamped onto its seaward tip and Cospicua closing off its landward base. Dockyard Creek runs along its western side, Kalkara Creek along its eastern. The whole town is about six hundred metres from the fort's gate to the land front, which means everything of consequence is within a ten-minute walk of everything else. Officially it carries the title Città Vittoriosa, and Maltese road signs and buses use both names interchangeably, which confuses first-time visitors more than it should.

The story behind it. The name is simply the borough, the settlement that grew under the medieval Castrum Maris. When the Order of St John was granted Malta in 1530 the Knights rejected Mdina, the walled inland capital, and moved into Birgu because it commanded deep water. For forty-one years this was their convent and the de facto capital. Each langue built its auberge here, and several survive along Triq Hilda Tabone, the street the British called Britannic Street, and Triq il-Majjistral: modest, thick-walled houses with plain doorways rather than the palatial fronts the same organisations later commissioned in Valletta. After the Great Siege of 1565 the Order moved across the harbour and Birgu was left as a naval and mercantile suburb, which is precisely why so much sixteenth-century fabric survived instead of being rebuilt in Baroque.

The land front. Approach by road and you pass through a sequence rather than a gate. A stone bridge crosses the ditch to the Advanced Gate of 1722, then the Couvre Porte counterguard, then the main gate under the Post of Castile. The ditch below is deep, dry and rock-cut, and you can walk parts of it. Beneath the counterguard is a rock-hewn air-raid shelter dug by hand during the Second World War, now open as a museum, with family cubicles chiselled into the living stone and a maternity room at the end of one gallery.

What you actually see today. The core is a grid of alleys, some no wider than outstretched arms, rising in shallow steps. Look for the Norman House on Triq il-Majjistral, a medieval townhouse with a twin-arched window that predates the Knights entirely. The collegiate church of St Lawrence dominates the skyline: it served as the Order's conventual church until 1571 and was rebuilt to Lorenzo Gafà's design in the 1680s and 1690s, with a dome that was destroyed by bombing in 1942 and reconstructed afterwards. Inside hangs a large canvas of the martyrdom of St Lawrence by Mattia Preti. The small oratory alongside keeps relics of the siege, including a hat and sword traditionally attributed to Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette. Vittoriosa Square, the old marketplace, holds a monument of 1705 and is where the town's cafés put their tables out.

On the water. The Birgu waterfront along Dockyard Creek is the one part of the town that has been thoroughly reinvented. The long line of eighteenth-century stores and the Order's treasury buildings were restored around 2003 and now front a deep-water yacht marina; the contrast between a hundred-metre motor yacht and the bastion behind it is the shot most visitors take. At the near end stands the Freedom Monument, unveiled in 1979 to mark the departure of the last British forces on 31 March that year, showing a Maltese man shaking hands with a sailor. Two of Malta's better museums are on this side: the maritime museum in the former Royal Naval Bakery, and the Inquisitor's Palace one street inland.

Getting there and timing. The passenger ferry from Lascaris Wharf under Valletta crosses in roughly five minutes and is far and away the best arrival; from the marina you climb into the town through a gate in the bastion. Buses serve the land front, and there is limited parking outside the walls — do not attempt to drive into the old core. Wear shoes with grip, because the polished limestone paving is genuinely slippery after rain. Late spring and autumn are the comfortable months. The town empties of day-trippers by about five in the afternoon, at which point the light turns the bastions the colour of raw honey and the place becomes something close to silent. Once a year in October the street lights are switched off and the alleys are lined with thousands of candles for a weekend, which is the most atmospheric thing that happens anywhere on the island.