Upper Barrakka Gardens

Where it sits. The Upper Barrakka Gardens sit on the roof of St Peter and St Paul Bastion, at the southeastern edge of Valletta about 58 metres directly above the water of the Grand Harbour. This is the single best vantage point in the Maltese islands and the geography explains why. The bastion projects out from the city wall like a bow, so the terrace looks straight down the length of the harbour: the dockyard creeks to the right, the fortified promontories of Senglea and Birgu directly opposite with Fort St Angelo at the point of Birgu, Kalkara Creek beyond, and to the left the harbour mouth between Fort St Elmo and Fort Ricasoli, with open sea past the breakwater. Ships, tugs, ferries and the occasional cruise liner move through the whole composition, which is what keeps the view from feeling like a postcard.

The colonnade and why it lost its roof. The garden began around 1661 as a private retreat for the knights of the Italian langue, laid out on the bastion top with an arcaded loggia along the seaward edge. The roof came off after 1775. That year a group of Maltese priests and soldiers seized Fort St Elmo and St James Cavalier in what became known as the Rising of the Priests, and in the aftermath the Order became nervous about enclosed spaces where conspirators could meet unobserved. The covering was removed, leaving the arches standing as a free-standing screen. The accident of that decision produced the view everyone photographs: a row of stone arches framing the harbour, open to the sky. The British opened the gardens to the public in 1824, and they have been a public terrace ever since.

The planting and the monuments. For a garden of this fame it is small, perhaps a hundred metres along the bastion and thirty deep, and the planting is Mediterranean and practical rather than showy: ficus, oleander, hibiscus, bougainvillea over pergolas, orange and lemon trees, jacaranda that comes into blue flower in May, and beds edged with clipped hedging. Shade is genuine here, which in a treeless city matters. Scattered through it are memorials to the British century and to Malta's own: a bust of Lord Strickland, a monument to Sir Thomas Maitland, a bust of Winston Churchill, and, best of all, Les Gavroches, Antonio Sciortino's 1907 bronze of three ragged children running, one of the few pieces of public sculpture on the island that people actually stop for. The plaques on the parapet name the ships and units that used the harbour below.

What is directly underneath. The terrace overhangs two things worth knowing about. On the ledge immediately below is the Saluting Battery, restored to working order in the 2000s, whose guns fire at noon and again at four in the afternoon; the concussion arrives at the parapet a fraction after the smoke, and the crowd along the railing thickens about fifteen minutes beforehand. At the northern corner is the head of the Barrakka Lift, two glass-fronted cabins in a slim steel tower that drop 58 metres to Lascaris Wharf in roughly 25 seconds, opened in 2012 on the line of an earlier lift of 1905 that was dismantled in the 1980s. That lift changes how you use the city: it connects the highest point of Valletta directly to the harbour front, the cruise terminal and the Three Cities ferry, and it is free on the way down.

Reading the harbour. Take a minute to orient before you photograph. Directly opposite, the long fortified spur with a lighthouse-like tower on its tip is Senglea, and the pointed watchtower on its bastion carries a carved eye and ear, the gardjola. To its right across Dockyard Creek is Birgu with Fort St Angelo, the Order's headquarters before Valletta existed and the fortress from which the 1565 siege was directed. The scars of the Second World War are still legible: the dockyard below was among the most heavily bombed targets in Europe, and the flat modern warehouse roofs mark where nineteenth-century buildings were lost.

Getting there and timing. From City Gate, walk in and bear right past Parliament House to Castille Place; the garden entrance is beside the Auberge de Castille, a level five-minute walk with no steps, so this is one of the few high viewpoints in Valletta reachable by wheelchair. Entry is free and the gates open early. Go at first light for the harbour in soft eastern sun with the terrace empty, or in the last hour before sunset when the light turns the far bastions gold and the ferries start crossing. Midday is glare from the water, and the noon gun brings a crowd three deep at the railing.