Three Cities (Malta)

Where they sit. The Three Cities occupy the southern shore of the Grand Harbour, directly across the water from Valletta and close enough that a shout carries. Two of them are peninsulas. Birgu, which the Knights renamed Vittoriosa, runs out on a spine of rock that ends at Fort St Angelo. Senglea, officially L-Isla, is the parallel finger immediately to the west. Cospicua, known to everyone who lives there as Bormla, fills the bowl of land behind both, wrapping around the heads of the two inlets that divide them: Dockyard Creek between Birgu and Senglea, and French Creek on Senglea's western flank. The three together counted 10,808 residents at the 2014 census, in a footprint a determined walker crosses in about forty minutes.

Why they came first. Birgu is far older than Valletta. A settlement clustered under the medieval Castrum Maris long before the Order of St John landed in 1530, and when the Knights arrived they took Birgu as their convent rather than the inland capital at Mdina, because whoever held this promontory held the deepest harbour in the central Mediterranean. Senglea was laid out in the 1550s by Grand Master Claude de la Sengle, who gave it his name and walled it. Bormla, the old agricultural hinterland, was granted the honorific Città Cospicua in the eighteenth century. For forty-one years, from 1530 until the Knights moved across to their new city in 1571, this cramped triangle of limestone was the effective capital of Malta and the headquarters of a sovereign military order.

1565. The Great Siege is the hinge of the whole story. Ottoman forces landed in May and spent a month destroying Fort St Elmo across the harbour before turning on Birgu and Senglea. A chain and a bridge of boats linked the two peninsulas so defenders could be shuttled between them; a seaborne assault on Senglea's tip in July was broken partly by a masked battery firing at point-blank range from the Birgu shore. The relief force from Sicily landed in September and the siege collapsed. Birgu became Città Vittoriosa, the victorious city; Senglea became Città Invicta, the unconquered one. Those titles are still carved over gates and printed on the band clubs' banners.

Walls upon walls. What survives is one of the densest concentrations of early modern military architecture anywhere. The inner Santa Margherita Lines were begun in 1638 to a design by the Dominican engineer Vincenzo Maculano da Firenzuola; the outer Cottonera Lines followed from 1670 under Grand Master Nicolas Cotoner, laid out by the Piedmontese engineer Antonio Maurizio Valperga as an enceinte of eight bastions running for several kilometres across the high ground behind Bormla. Neither ring was ever finished as drawn. The result is a layered landscape where you can walk from a Baroque gate through a dry ditch into a Victorian barrack yard within five minutes.

The century of the dockyard. Under British rule the creeks became the Royal Navy's principal Mediterranean base. Dry docks were cut into Dockyard Creek and French Creek from the 1840s onward, and for a hundred and twenty years the yard was the largest employer on the islands; thousands of Cottonera men went through its gates every morning. That also made the Three Cities the most bombed square kilometre in the country. The attack on the carrier HMS Illustrious in January 1941, moored in French Creek, flattened much of Senglea and Cospicua in a matter of days. Senglea's parish church was destroyed and its population scattered. The postwar rebuilding is visible everywhere in the plainer, flat-roofed blocks that sit between surviving Baroque façades.

What it feels like now. The reversal has been dramatic. Birgu's waterfront warehouses on Dockyard Creek were converted into a yacht marina in the early 2000s, and superyachts now moor where galleys were once hauled out. Behind them the old grid is intact: stepped alleys barely two metres wide, wooden balconies painted oxblood and green, corner niches with saints under small lamps, and the collegiate church of St Lawrence rising above it all. Senglea keeps its stone vedette carved with an eye, an ear and a crane at the point, one of the most photographed objects in Malta. Bormla is the least gentrified and the most lived-in of the three. Locals speak a recognisable Cottonera dialect that people from other towns will comment on.

Getting there and timing. The simplest approach is the passenger ferry from Lascaris Wharf below Valletta's Upper Barrakka Gardens, which lands at the Birgu marina in about five minutes and gives the best first view of the bastions from the water; the Barrakka Lift drops you to the quay. Buses run from the Valletta terminus. Spring and mid-autumn are the sensible seasons, since the streets are stone-walled ovens in August. Two dates are worth planning around: the regatta rowed in the harbour on 8 September and 31 March, when crews from Birgu, Bormla, Senglea, Kalkara and Marsa race for their towns' colours, and the October night when Birgu switches off its street lights and lines the alleys with candles.