Fort St. Elmo

Where it sits. Fort Saint Elmo occupies the low, exposed tip of the Sciberras peninsula at the northeastern end of Valletta, where the ridge runs out into the sea between the two harbours. That position is the entire point of the place: guns here cover the entrance to the Grand Harbour on one side and the entrance to Marsamxett Harbour on the other, and any fleet attempting either has to pass under them. The fort is a low, sprawling, irregular complex rather than a tall castle, built to present as little target as possible, and from the ramparts you look across to Fort Ricasoli on one headland and Fort Tigné on the other, the three of them forming a triangle of crossfire over the sea approach.

The 1565 siege. The Order built a star-shaped fort here in 1552, before Valletta existed, to protect the harbours from a base at Birgu. In May 1565 the Ottoman army landed and, on the advice of its commanders, decided to reduce St Elmo first. The garrison of a few hundred, reinforced at night by boat across the harbour from Birgu, held out under continuous bombardment from batteries on the ridge above from 24 May until 23 June. When the fort finally fell almost every defender was dead. The cost to the besiegers was enormous, variously estimated in the thousands, and among the mortally wounded was the corsair commander Turgut Reis, known in the west as Dragut. The month those men bought is generally regarded as the reason the rest of the island held until the relief force arrived in September. Every element of Valletta that followed was built on the strategic lesson of that month.

How it grew afterwards. The rebuilt fort was absorbed into the fortifications of the new city and repeatedly enlarged. A cavalier was raised inside it, and between 1687 and the early 1700s the Flemish engineer Carlos de Grunenbergh added the seaward batteries and outer enceinte at his own expense, marking them with his coat of arms in stone above the gate, which is still there. The British extended it further in the nineteenth century, adding barracks and later gun positions, and used it as a police and army establishment. What you walk through today is therefore a layered site: sixteenth-century curtain, seventeenth-century Baroque outworks, Victorian barrack blocks and twentieth-century concrete emplacements all in the same enclosure.

The Second World War. St Elmo fired the first Maltese shots of the war. When Italian aircraft raided the harbours on 11 June 1940 the anti-aircraft guns here opened up, and the fort remained an active air-defence position for three years. On the night of 26 July 1941 the Italian naval special forces of the Decima Flottiglia MAS attempted to force the Grand Harbour with explosive motorboats; the searchlights and quick-firing guns on and around St Elmo destroyed the attacking craft within minutes, and the span of the breakwater bridge collapsed onto the boat that had blown it. It was one of the most complete defensive victories of the Mediterranean war, and the twisted remains of the bridge lay in the water for decades until a replacement span was installed in 2012.

What is inside now. After a long restoration completed in the middle of the 2010s, the fort houses the National War Museum, run by Heritage Malta, which covers the islands from the Bronze Age to independence but is strongest on the twentieth century. Its most significant objects are Malta's George Cross, awarded to the whole population in April 1942, the accompanying scroll sent by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the surviving fuselage of Faith, one of three obsolete Gloster Gladiator biplanes that flew the island's earliest defensive sorties. The parade ground, the chapel of St Anne, the cavalier and long stretches of rampart are open, and the restored barrack blocks around the parade square show how much of the fort belongs to the nineteenth century rather than the sixteenth. On several Sundays through the cooler months a costumed re-enactment group performs a parade and drill display of the Order's period on the parade ground, which is free to watch from the ramparts. Its stark stone yards have served as a film location several times, most famously standing in for a Turkish prison in a 1978 feature.

Getting there and timing. Walk the full length of Republic Street from City Gate and continue to the point, about twenty-five minutes on a gentle slope, or take a bus along the Marsamxett side. Allow two hours for the museum and ramparts together, and combine it with the Lower Barrakka Gardens and the Siege Bell five minutes back along the shore. The site is mostly open ground with uneven historic paving and few shaded corners, so mornings and the cooler half of the year are much more comfortable; sea wind at the point can be strong even when the city is still.