Sannat

Where it sits. Sannat — properly Ta' Sannat — occupies the southern edge of Gozo's central plateau, about two kilometres south of Victoria, and stops where the island stops. Beyond the last houses the fields run out onto open garrigue and then end in the Ta' Ċenċ cliffs, a wall of coralline limestone dropping straight into the sea from a height of well over a hundred metres. Around 2,000 people live in the village. Its position gives it two entirely different characters within a ten-minute walk: an ordinary inland Gozitan settlement of narrow streets and small farms on one side, and one of the emptiest, windiest landscapes in the Maltese islands on the other.

The cliffs. Ta' Ċenċ is the highest and longest cliff line on Gozo's south coast, running for roughly two kilometres and reaching somewhere near 130 metres at its most dramatic. The rock is hard Upper Coralline Limestone that has fractured along vertical joints, so the face is sheer rather than sloping and the sea is directly below with no shelf. Because the cliffs face south and southwest, they take the full weight of winter storms and the afternoon sun, and the light there in the two hours before sunset — raking across the pale stone and the low thyme-scented scrub — is the reason photographers keep coming back. There is no fence and no barrier for most of the length, which demands genuine caution in wind.

Prehistory on the plateau. The garrigue above the cliffs is one of the richest archaeological surfaces on Gozo, and almost none of it is signposted. Pairs of parallel grooves worn into the bedrock — the so-called cart ruts, of uncertain date and even more uncertain purpose — cross the plateau in several places, some of them running towards the cliff edge and stopping at it. A dolmen survives near the Ta' Ċenċ hotel: a large capstone resting on upright slabs, a burial monument of the Bronze Age, roughly contemporary with the people who followed the temple builders of Ġgantija. Scattered menhirs and rock-cut features complete a landscape that has been used and marked for more than four thousand years.

Birds and habitat. The cliffs hold internationally significant seabird colonies. Cory's shearwater and the smaller Yelkouan shearwater both nest in crevices in the rock face, coming ashore only after dark; on summer nights their calls carry up the cliff, a wailing, almost human sound that gave rise to a good deal of local folklore. Peregrine falcons and blue rock thrushes — the latter Malta's national bird — also use the face. Much of the area is designated under the EU Natura 2000 network and part of it is managed as a nature reserve, with restrictions on access during the breeding season. The garrigue itself, thin soil over exposed rock, supports thyme, heather, spurge and orchids in spring.

The village. The parish church of St Margaret gives the village its centre; Sannat became an independent parish in 1688, and the present church was largely built through the first half of the eighteenth century, with later additions. Sannat has a long association with Maltese lace — bizzilla — the bobbin lace introduced from Genoa in the sixteenth century and revived as a cottage industry in the nineteenth, and older women working lace pillows in doorways is still an occasional sight rather than a staged one. Westward along the coast, the Sanap Cliffs offer the same views from slightly lower ground and are reached by an easy track from the neighbouring village of Munxar, making them the gentler alternative to Ta' Ċenċ.

Getting there and timing. Bus 305 links Victoria with Sannat in under ten minutes, and the walk from Victoria takes around forty minutes on a steady rise. From the village, a lane runs south past the hotel and becomes a rough track to the cliff edge in about fifteen minutes on foot. A longer route follows the cliff line east and then drops into the valley of Mġarr ix-Xini, joining the creek in roughly an hour. Spring is the best season by a wide margin: the garrigue flowers, the shearwaters are active, and the light is clean. Summer afternoons on the plateau are shadeless and punishing. Winter delivers spectacular sea states but also the wind that makes the unfenced edge genuinely dangerous. The village streets are level; the cliff approach is uneven rock and not manageable on wheels.