Ghajn Tuffieha Bay

Where it sits. Għajn Tuffieħa is a bay and beach on the northwest coast of Malta, 345 metres south of Golden Bay across a rocky headland and administratively within Mġarr. The name means spring of apples, and the mistranslation apple's eye turns up so often in English that it has almost stuck; older tourist material calls the bay Riviera, after a hotel that closed in 1988 and whose shell still stands above the sand. The bay sits in a natural amphitheatre: steep clay slopes on three sides, sandstone cliffs at the northern point carrying Għajn Tuffieħa Tower, and a beach of coarse reddish-brown sand that gives it a completely different colour from the pale beaches around Mellieħa.

The staircase, and what it does. There is no road to the sand. Reaching the beach means descending a flight of roughly 200 steps cut and built into the clay slope from the car park above, and climbing them again to leave. That single fact governs the character of the place. It filters out day-trippers with cool boxes and pushchairs, keeps the beach measurably quieter than Golden Bay a few minutes' walk away, and makes Għajn Tuffieħa the bay Maltese people go to when they want to swim rather than to be at a resort. It also makes it unsuitable for anyone with mobility difficulties, and it means everything on the beach — including the water sold at the café at the foot of the steps — has been carried down by hand.

Red sand and moving ground. The reddish sand comes from the Blue Clay formation that makes up the slopes around the bay, which erodes far faster than the limestone above it. Those slopes are actively unstable: sections of the path have been rebuilt after slips, and the clay terraces behind the beach are held together by tamarisk, esparto grass and planted cover. The water is startlingly clear over sand and seagrass, deepening quickly a few metres out. The bay is fully exposed to the northwest, so swell rolls straight in, and the currents that run off the headlands in a blow are genuinely strong — there is no permanent lifeguard cover of the kind Golden Bay has, and the safest swimming is in settled summer weather.

Roman baths and a Lascaris tower. Above the southern end of the bay, in the area known as il-Ġnien ta' Għajn Tuffieħa, lie the remains of a Roman bath complex built in roughly the first or second century AD as part of a rural villa estate — rooms for hot and cold bathing and for relaxation, with later additions, laid out to use the spring that gave the place its name. On the clifftop at the northern edge stands Għajn Tuffieħa Tower, its foundation stone laid by Grand Master Giovanni Paolo Lascaris in 1637, one of the seven towers he built around the coast. It is an elongated block with a larger ground floor than upper storey, once armed with a half-pounder cannon and manned by a captain and three men; a medieval watch post of the Mahras militia had almost certainly occupied the same ground before it. Cliff erosion beneath the tower has been a long-running concern.

On screen. Għajn Tuffieħa has one of the longer film résumés of any Maltese beach. The Disney thriller Trenchcoat (1983) used both the bay and the tower; the French thriller Les Loups entre Eux (1985) shot here; and Black Eagle (1988), with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sho Kosugi, listed Għajn Tuffieħa among its Maltese locations alongside Valletta, Mdina and Fort Ricasoli. What productions want is what visitors want: a beach with a seventeenth-century tower on the cliff above it and nothing modern in shot.

The coastal walk. The bay is the middle link of the best coastal walk in Malta. North, a path climbs the headland to Golden Bay in fifteen minutes; south, a rougher route crosses the ridge past the tower and drops to Ġnejna Bay in about forty. The whole stretch north of Golden Bay is protected as Majjistral Park. There is no shade anywhere along it, and the clay underfoot turns greasy after rain.

Getting there and timing. Bus 44 from Valletta and 101 from Mellieħa stop at Golden Bay, leaving a ten-minute walk to the top of the steps; there is a rough car park above the bay. A café at the foot of the staircase operates in season and has occasionally attracted controversy over how much of the public beach it occupies. May, June, September and October give warm water and manageable crowds; spring is the season for the walk, when the slopes are green and flowering and the descent is not a heat trial.