Delimara Lighthouse

Where it sits. The Delimara lighthouse stands on the crest of the Delimara peninsula, the eastern arm of Marsaxlokk Bay, on high open ground at the southeastern corner of the Maltese main island. From the terrace beside it the view runs north to Marsaskala, west across the bay to Birżebbuġa and the container gantries of the Freeport, and east over empty water; St Peter's Pool lies a short distance down the slope. There are in fact two lighthouses on the site, standing side by side and easy to confuse: the Victorian tower that has not carried a navigational light since 1990, and the plain rectangular building that replaced it and does.

Built with the empire's rope in hand. The first light was established in 1855, during British rule, as one of a pair commissioned at the same moment — its twin is the Giordan lighthouse on the northern heights of Gozo. Between them they marked the two ends of the archipelago for the shipping that was increasingly using Malta as a coaling and naval station on the route to Suez and India. The Delimara structure is a masonry tower of eight sides rising about twenty-two metres from a two-storey keeper's residence, built in the local limestone and left unpainted, so that it weathers to the same honey-grey as the rock it stands on. It is frequently described as one of the better pieces of British colonial architecture in Malta, and its proportions — a functional tower detailed as a small house — bear that out.

The mechanism. The original apparatus produced a fixed red light from lamps burning olive oil, the standard illuminant of the period in the Mediterranean. In 1896 it was rebuilt around a far more sophisticated system supplied by Chance Brothers of Smethwick, the Birmingham glassworks that equipped lighthouses across the British Empire. A Fresnel lens assembly was mounted on a rotating table, driven by a clockwork train powered by a weight that descended slowly through the tower and had to be wound back up by the keeper; the rotation produced an alternating red and white flash every thirty seconds. The lamps burned paraffin, stored in a copper tank with brass fittings. This arrangement remained in service, with modification, until the light was decommissioned in 1990.

Decline and rescue. By the time the light was switched off, the tower and its house were in poor condition. The building was handed to Din l-Art Ħelwa, Malta's national trust, and restored over three phases with sponsorship from the Malta Maritime Authority and a Maltese insurer. The first phase repaired the external fabric — walls, timber apertures, roof and lantern housing — and stripped out the cement mortars that had been applied in earlier decades, replacing them with a hydraulic lime mix appropriate to the stone. The second phase, completed in early 2008, put services, a kitchen and bathrooms into the keeper's quarters. The third, which took a further five years, restored the lantern machinery and the gas prisms. The keeper's accommodation now operates as two self-catering apartments sleeping five each, arranged around the central shaft of the tower — one of very few places in Malta where a visitor can stay inside a scheduled monument.

The working light today. Navigation is now handled by the low rectangular two-storey block built alongside and inaugurated in 1990. It is unglamorous and deliberately so: observation windows, roof-mounted radar and aerials, and a light with a focal plane about thirty-five metres above the sea showing a double white flash every twelve seconds, visible for some eighteen nautical miles. It doubles as a coastal traffic control post for the approaches to Marsaxlokk Bay, which handles both the Freeport's container ships and the tankers serving the power station on the western shore of the peninsula.

Getting there and timing. There is no bus. From the terminus in Marsaxlokk it is a walk of roughly three kilometres along the Delimara road, mostly uphill and without shade, taking around forty minutes; a taxi or hire car covers it in ten, and there is rough parking near the top. The buildings are private — the apartments are let, and the working tower is operational — so the visit is an exterior one, but the surrounding open ground is freely walkable and the outlook is the reason to come. Late afternoon is the best light on the old tower's western face; sunrise, seen from the ledges below towards St Peter's Pool, is the other reason people make the climb. Spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons for the walk out.