Villa Bighi

Where it sits. Villa Bighi crowns the Bighi headland in Kalkara, the blunt promontory that separates Kalkara Creek from Rinella and looks straight up the Grand Harbour at Valletta. The position is one of the best in Malta: the buildings stand on a low cliff with the water directly below, Fort St Angelo to the left, the Valletta bastions and the Lower Barrakka Gardens opposite, and the harbour mouth to the right. Anyone who has photographed Valletta from across the water in evening light has probably done it from somewhere on this headland.

The story behind it. The name is a Maltese rendering of Bichi. In the seventeenth century a palazzo was built here for Giovanni Bichi, a nephew of Grand Master Nicolas Cotoner, as a summer villa on what was then open ground outside the fortified towns. The site's later and larger identity came with the Royal Navy. Malta was the base of the Mediterranean Fleet, and the fleet needed a proper hospital rather than the improvised wards it had been using in Valletta. The Royal Naval Hospital Bighi was built in the early 1830s on the villa's gardens, in a restrained Neoclassical manner: a central block with a colonnaded front, long flanking wings arranged to catch cross-ventilation, a chapel, and service buildings behind.

A hospital designed around the water. The most telling piece of engineering is the way patients arrived. Wounded and sick men came by boat from ships anchored in the harbour, and carrying them up the cliff on stretchers was slow and dangerous, so a lift was built into the rock face to raise them directly from a landing at the water's edge to the hospital terrace above. That detail says most of what needs saying about the place: it was not a villa with a hospital attached but a purpose-built machine for receiving casualties off the sea.

What it saw. Bighi handled the fleet's sick for well over a century. Its heaviest years were the two world wars. In the first, Malta became the principal receiving station for casualties evacuated from the Dardanelles and the eastern Mediterranean, and the island took in well over a hundred thousand sick and wounded men, earning it the nickname of the nurse of the Mediterranean; Bighi was at the centre of that effort. In the second, its position between the dockyard and the harbour mouth put it directly under the bombing, and parts of the complex were damaged while surgery continued. The hospital finally closed in 1970, ahead of the British withdrawal, and the buildings entered a long uncertain period.

What you actually see today. The site has been reused rather than mothballed. Part of the complex houses conservation and scientific laboratories that serve Malta's national heritage collections — the place where paintings, archaeological metal and stonework are analysed and treated. Alongside it, the national interactive science centre opened in the restored hospital buildings and new construction in 2016, with hands-on exhibits, a planetarium and extensive outdoor terraces and gardens laid out along the cliff edge. Those gardens are the reason a general traveller comes: they are freely accessible, they run right to the parapet above the harbour, and they give an unobstructed panorama that includes Fort St Angelo, the whole Valletta waterfront, the Three Cities creeks and the breakwater. The Neoclassical façades, the chapel and the old wards frame the view without competing with it.

Reading the harbour from here. Bighi is the best single place to understand the geography of the Grand Harbour. From the parapet you can trace the entrance between Ricasoli and St Elmo, follow the line of the Valletta bastions along to the Barrakka Gardens, look down Dockyard Creek to the Birgu marina and Senglea's point, and pick out the shipyard cranes in French Creek beyond. Interpretation is barely necessary — the shape of the place explains itself.

Getting there and timing. Buses serve Kalkara from Valletta and the Three Cities; on foot it is about fifteen minutes from the Birgu waterfront around the head of Kalkara Creek and up the slope, or twenty-five minutes from the Valletta ferry landing. There is parking at the science centre. The gardens and terraces are open beyond museum hours in the warmer months, and evening is unquestionably the time to be here, when the low sun hits Valletta's limestone across the water and the bastions turn amber. Families with children should budget two to three hours for the exhibits; anyone coming purely for the site and the view needs forty-five minutes. Combine it with Kalkara's creekside for a meal afterwards, or with Fort Rinella and the naval cemetery further east along the coast.