San Lawrenz

Where it sits. San Lawrenz occupies the western end of Gozo, about five kilometres from Victoria, and with fewer than a thousand residents it is among the smallest localities in the Maltese islands. The village sits in a shallow bowl between two rises: Ta' Dbieġi to the north, which at roughly 194 metres is the highest point on Gozo, and the ground that falls away west towards the sea at Dwejra. That geography has kept the place small and largely agricultural, and it explains why a village of a few hundred houses controls one of the most spectacular stretches of coast in the archipelago.

The story behind it. The settlement grew from a scatter of farmhouses around a chapel dedicated to St Lawrence, and became an independent parish only in 1893, one of the last on the island to be detached from a neighbouring one. The present parish church was built between 1886 and 1897, a compact and relatively restrained building by Gozitan standards, with a dome added later. The village square in front of it, planted with mature trees and lined with low limestone houses, is the whole of the centre; there is no commercial strip and no through traffic beyond the road down to Dwejra.

A writer's retreat. The English novelist Nicholas Monsarrat, whose wartime novel The Cruel Sea had made him internationally known, moved to San Lawrenz in the late 1960s and lived here until his death in 1979. He built a house on the edge of the village and wrote several books there, including The Kappillan of Malta, a novel of the Second World War siege told through a Maltese parish priest. His association with the village is quietly commemorated locally and is part of a longer pattern of the Gozitan west attracting people looking for somewhere genuinely quiet.

The coast that belongs to the village. San Lawrenz's territory includes Dwejra, the collapsed-cave coastline that is Gozo's best-known natural landscape. Here the Inland Sea sits behind the cliff as a shallow lagoon connected to open water by a natural tunnel roughly eighty metres long, through which small boats carry passengers out to the open coast when the sea is calm. Fungus Rock, a flat-topped limestone stack about sixty metres high, closes the mouth of Dwejra Bay; the Knights of St John prized a parasitic plant that grew on its summit for supposed medicinal properties and made the rock a guarded reserve, building Dwejra Tower on the shore in 1652 to watch over it. The Azure Window, the great sea arch that stood at the northern end of this coast, collapsed entirely in a storm on 8 March 2017. The Blue Hole, a natural rock chimney about ten metres wide connecting to the open sea through an underwater arch, remains one of the most heavily dived sites in the Mediterranean.

What you actually see today. Above the village, Ta' Dbieġi Crafts Village occupies a group of low buildings where glass blowing, filigree silver, lace and pottery are made and sold — a survivor of a 1970s scheme to keep Gozitan crafts commercially alive. The hill itself gives a clean panorama across the western half of the island. Below the village, terraced fields drop towards the coast in narrow parcels bounded by rubble walls, worked for potatoes, onions and vines. A luxury hotel opened on the village edge in 1997, bringing a level of accommodation the western end of Gozo had never had, without much changing the character of the square. The parish feast falls on 10 August.

Getting there and timing. Bus 311 runs from Victoria through San Lawrenz and down to Dwejra in around twenty minutes; by car the same trip takes ten. The walk from the village down to Dwejra takes about twenty-five minutes and repays the effort on the way back with the sea behind you. Spring brings wildflowers across the garrigue at Dwejra and calm enough water for the Inland Sea boat trips to run reliably; winter storms shut them down for days at a time and make the coastal rock platform hazardous. Late afternoon and sunset are the reason to be at Dwejra rather than anywhere else, since this is the only west-facing coast on Gozo with the depth of foreground to make it count. The village is flat and easy; the coastal rock at Dwejra is uneven and unprotected.