Cottonera Lines

Where they run. The Cottonera Lines are a continuous belt of bastioned wall thrown across the high ground behind the Three Cities, anchored at each end on the sea — one flank coming down to Kalkara Creek, the other to French Creek — and bulging inland in a wide arc through Cospicua and Birgu's hinterland. The circuit runs for something over four kilometres. Because they follow the ridge, the lines are visible from a long way off: driving in from Żabbar or Fgura you meet a rampart of cut stone twenty metres high with a rock-hewn ditch in front of it, standing in what is otherwise ordinary suburban Malta.

Why they exist. The 1565 siege taught the Order an expensive lesson: whoever holds the high ground behind the harbour towns can bombard them at will, and the Ottomans had done exactly that from the ridges above Bormla. An inner ring, the Santa Margherita Lines, was begun in 1638 to designs by the Dominican engineer Vincenzo Maculano da Firenzuola, but progress was slow and the ring was too tight. In 1670, Grand Master Nicolas Cotoner commissioned a far more ambitious outer enceinte from the Piedmontese military engineer Antonio Maurizio Valperga, and paid for a large share of it himself, which is why the lines carry his name — and why the whole district is still called Cottonera. The design enclosed enough ground not only to protect the three cities but to shelter the rural population and their livestock behind the walls in the event of another invasion.

What was actually built. Valperga laid out eight bastions linked by curtain walls, with a deep ditch quarried out of the rock in front — the stone from the ditch conveniently becoming the stone of the wall above it. Construction ran on for decades and the design was never completed as drawn. The intended cavaliers, outworks and countermine galleries were left partly unbuilt, and contemporaries argued the enceinte was simply too long for the Order to man: defending four kilometres of wall needs a garrison the Knights could not raise. The lines were never tested in a siege. When the French took Malta in 1798 it was by capitulation, and in the blockade that followed the Maltese insurgents used the works from the outside rather than the inside.

Gates and later layers. The set piece is the Notre Dame Gate, also called Żabbar Gate, built in the 1670s on the outer face of the lines: a monumental Baroque frontispiece with military trophies carved in relief and chambers inside the gate structure itself. It has been restored and is used for exhibitions and events. Elsewhere the British left their own marks — a mid-nineteenth-century fort built inside the enceinte on the highest ground, magazines, barracks and gun positions adapted for rifled artillery, and roadways cut through the curtain when the walls stopped being defensive and started being an obstacle to traffic.

What you see today. The lines survive in long, impressive stretches interrupted by breaches. Some sections run beside a road with the ditch turned into a service lane or car park; others front open scrub where you can walk the ditch floor and look up at the full height of a bastion face, the courses of stone stepping back in a batter. Housing, schools, a stadium and sports grounds have grown up against and inside the walls, so the experience is one of a fortress absorbed into a living town rather than a preserved monument. Substantial conservation work has been carried out on several sections since the 2000s, cleaning centuries of black crust off the masonry and repairing collapsed parapets, and the difference between restored and unrestored stretches is dramatic.

How to walk them. The most rewarding stretch is on the Żabbar side, starting at the Notre Dame Gate and following the ditch towards Cospicua; allow an hour at an unhurried pace, longer if you scramble. A second good section runs above Kalkara. From the top of the ridge you get the view that explains everything: the whole of the Three Cities laid out below, the creeks, the dockyard cranes, Valletta beyond, and open sea past the harbour mouth. Between the two rings of walls there is still undeveloped ground, which is one of the few places in this part of Malta where you can stand in something like open country.

Getting there and timing. Buses from Valletta towards Żabbar and Cospicua pass the lines at several points; by car, park near the Notre Dame Gate. There is no ticket and no gate to close, though some enclosed sections belong to schools or clubs and are not accessible. Wear proper shoes — the ditch floor is rough rock with loose stone — and carry water, since there is no shade whatsoever along the walls. The cooler half of the year is much better for this, and low winter sun on the bastion faces is what photographers want anyway.