Salini Salt Pans

Where it sits. Is-Salina, usually rendered in English as Salina Bay, is a long narrow inlet on Malta's northeastern coast, biting inland between Qawra to the northwest and Baħar iċ-Ċagħaq to the southeast, on the boundary of the Naxxar and St Paul's Bay districts. Unlike almost every other bay on this coast it is not a swimming bay: the head of the inlet is shallow, muddy and half-enclosed, and instead of hotels and lidos it holds saltmarsh, salt pans and one of the few pieces of genuine wetland left in the Maltese islands. The coast road and its cycle path run along the northern shore, linking the Qawra promenade with the beaches at Baħar iċ-Ċagħaq.

The salt pans. The pans that give the bay its name — salina is the Romance word for a saltworks — were laid out at the head of the inlet under the Knights of St John, who ran salt production as a state monopoly and needed a supply close to the harbours. Rectangular basins were cut and built at the point where the sea reaches furthest inland and evaporation is most efficient, and they remained in commercial use into the twentieth century. Many fell derelict, and a restoration programme in recent decades has brought part of the complex back into condition, with interpretation covering how the pans were flooded, worked and harvested. The geometry of the basins, seen from the road above, is the most striking human mark on the bay.

The nature reserve. Salina Nature Reserve occupies the marshy land around the pans and has been managed by BirdLife Malta since the middle of the 2010s, with paths, hides and screens. Its distinguishing feature is a stand of white mangrove — Avicennia marina — the only mangrove growing in Malta and one of a tiny number of relict stands in the central Mediterranean, of considerable botanical interest and probably ancient. Around it are saltmarsh plants tolerant of the brackish water: glassworts, sea rush, tamarisk. The bay sits directly on a migration route between Europe and Africa, and the reserve is one of the reliable places on the island to see herons, little egrets, plovers, sandpipers, stilts and kingfishers, with the heaviest passage in spring and autumn. On an island whose reputation for its treatment of migrating birds is poor, the reserve is also a piece of active conservation politics.

The other things around the bay. Kennedy Grove, a public garden of pines and Mediterranean planting on the southern shore, was laid out in the 1960s as a memorial to John F. Kennedy and remains one of the larger areas of shade in the north of the island — used for picnics, for the annual Malta beer festival and for weddings. On the coast at the mouth of the bay stands Ximenes Redoubt, one of the small polygonal gun positions the Order threw up around the shoreline in the 1710s to cover the landing places between the main fortifications; it has been restored and is a useful marker of how comprehensively the Knights fortified this coast. Roman-period rock-cut catacombs are recorded on the slopes above the bay, and the prehistoric Tal-Qadi temple lies inland at Salina, a fragmentary site that produced a carved stone slab marked with radiating divisions and star-like symbols, now in the National Museum of Archaeology and much discussed as a possible astronomical device.

What you actually do here. Walk. The circuit of the bay, taking in the pans, the reserve boundary, Kennedy Grove and the redoubt, is a flat couple of hours and can be extended along the coast road in either direction; the cycle path makes it one of the easier stretches of Malta to ride. Bring binoculars. The reserve itself opens on limited days with guided access rather than free entry, so checking BirdLife Malta's schedule before turning up is sensible.

Getting there and timing. Buses along the Coast Road between Valletta, Sliema and St Paul's Bay stop at Salina, and Buġibba and Qawra are within walking distance for accommodation and food. Migration seasons — roughly March to May and September to November — are when the wetland earns the trip; midsummer is hot, still and quiet, and the shallow head of the bay can smell of drying weed. The bay faces northeast, so the light is best in the morning, and the pans reflect cleanly on windless days.

What makes it unusual. Malta is among the most densely built countries in Europe and has almost no surviving wetland; the little that remains is at Għadira near Mellieħa, at Simar in Xemxija and here. Salina is the one where the wetland, an industrial landscape of the Knights and a piece of eighteenth-century coastal defence sit within a few hundred metres of each other, which is why it repays a slow visit rather than a drive-past on the way to the beaches at Buġibba. Come for the salt pans and the birds arrive with them.