Malta at War Museum

Where it sits. The Malta at War Museum is set into Birgu's land front, in the Couvre Porte counterguard — the outwork you pass through on the way into the town from Cospicua. The complex includes a British-period barrack block above ground and, beneath it, a rock-hewn air-raid shelter cut into the living limestone of the bastion. Getting there means crossing the ditch and walking under the eighteenth-century gates, so the approach is itself part of the subject.

The story behind it. Malta spent the Second World War as the most concentrated air target in Europe. The islands sat astride the Axis supply route to North Africa, the Grand Harbour serviced the Royal Navy, and the airfields launched the aircraft and submarines that attacked convoys bound for Rommel. The response was sustained bombing from June 1940, rising to a peak in the spring of 1942, when the tonnage dropped on the harbour area in a matter of weeks exceeded what fell on London during the whole Blitz. King George VI awarded the George Cross to the island collectively in April 1942, an unprecedented decoration for a civilian population. The Three Cities, sitting directly on the dockyard, absorbed the worst of it.

Underground. The shelter beneath the museum is the reason to come. Malta's limestone is soft enough to cut with hand tools and hard enough to stand unsupported, so from 1940 onwards miners and volunteers drove galleries into the rock under the fortifications and the towns, producing one of the most extensive civil defence shelter systems anywhere. This one is among the largest. A stairway of around a hundred steps drops into a network of tunnels with side cubicles opening off the main galleries: families were allocated or rented individual chambers, which they plastered, wired for a light, furnished with beds and shrines, and lived in for weeks at a time during the worst months. There is a chapel niche and a small room fitted out as a maternity ward, where children were delivered while raids went on overhead. The air is still and cool, around eighteen degrees year-round, and the acoustics are unnervingly dead.

Above ground. The barrack block holds the interpretive collection: uniforms, ordnance, ration documents, civil defence equipment, unexploded bomb casings, and a great deal of ordinary domestic material that makes the siege legible at household scale. A small cinema screens the wartime documentary made about the island's ordeal and released in 1942, which is worth sitting through because it was assembled from footage shot during the raids by service cameramen and shows the harbour towns as they were being destroyed. The museum is run by a Maltese heritage foundation rather than the state, and the tone is closer to a well-organised local history society than a national institution — knowledgeable, unpolished, and better for it.

The fortifications around it. Couvre Porte is part of Birgu's land front, remodelled in the early eighteenth century, and the sequence of works here is one of the clearest in Malta: a bridge over a rock-cut ditch, the Advanced Gate with its carved trophies, the counterguard, and then the main gate under the Post of Castile. Because the museum controls part of the complex, a visit gives you access to sections of the bastion that would otherwise be closed, including views down into the ditch. The military and the civilian stories therefore sit on top of one another quite literally: an artillery outwork of the Knights with a twentieth-century civilian refuge carved out beneath it.

Practical warnings. The shelter is not an easy visit. There are around a hundred steps down and the same back up, the galleries are narrow and low in places, the floor is uneven rock, and there is no alternative route — anyone with mobility limitations, claustrophobia or a heart condition should consider the above-ground exhibits only, which are worthwhile in their own right. Take a light jacket in summer, because the temperature difference between the street and the tunnels is severe.

Getting there and timing. Buses from Valletta and the other harbour towns stop at the Birgu land front, a two-minute walk away; from the passenger ferry at the marina it is about ten minutes uphill through the town. Parking is available outside the walls. Allow ninety minutes for both levels including the film. Opening hours are shorter than the national museums and the last admission to the shelter is well before closing, so arrive with time in hand. It combines naturally with the Inquisitor's Palace and the maritime museum, both a few minutes inside the gates.