Sliema

Where it sits. Sliema fills a low limestone peninsula on Malta's northeast coast, with water on three sides — Marsamxett Harbour to the south, the open Mediterranean to the northeast, and St Julian's Bay to the north. From Ix-Xatt, the seafront street everyone calls the Strand, the bastions of Valletta stand about 700 metres across the creek, near enough to pick out individual embrasures in the wall. The town is barely more than a square kilometre of built ground and is the most densely populated locality in the country. Two very different waterfronts define it: the sheltered, workaday Strand facing the capital, and Tower Road, which runs roughly three kilometres along the exposed seaward edge with nothing between the pavement and the horizon.

From fishing shore to Victorian resort. The name comes from the Maltese word for peace, and is usually traced to a vanished chapel on the Tigné promontory dedicated to Our Lady of Good Voyage, which fishermen used as a bearing when working out of Marsamxett. Until the middle of the nineteenth century this was empty ground known as il-Qortin — the Ottoman camp during the Great Siege of 1565 was pitched here, and Dragut was killed on the point by gunfire from Fort St Elmo across the water. Growth began with a church: the foundation stone of the Stella Maris church was laid on 29 April 1853, the building opened for worship on 11 August 1855, and by Christmas Day 1878 the congregation had grown enough to be cut loose from the parish of St Helen in Birkirkara. Wealthy Valletta families built summer villas along the quiet inland streets, and in 1881 a seawater distillery went up to supply the British barracks on Tigné.

The seafront and its swimming. Tower Road takes its name from Saint Julian's Tower, completed in 1658 as the fifth of the thirteen De Redin watchtowers, with a semicircular battery wrapped around its seaward face in 1715; both now house a restaurant. A few hundred metres along stands Il-Fortizza, properly Sliema Point Battery, a mock-castellated British work of 1872–1876 that also trades as a restaurant today. Between and beyond them the shore is a flat shelf of globigerina limestone cut with rectangular bathing pools, ladders and small squared-off platforms — the local answer to a beach, and still the way most residents swim. Independence Garden, laid out in 1990 on an abandoned coastal farm, gives the promenade its only real shade. Sunset here faces inland, so the good light on the open shore is early morning; the Strand takes the golden hour on Valletta's walls instead.

What the town looks like now. Sliema is a study in what happens when a Victorian resort is rebuilt at speed. Streets of townhouses with enclosed timber balconies — the gallarija — survive inland, and a rare intact terrace of six of them stands at Belvedere Terrace above the Strand, protected so that nothing in front of them can be built up. Along the water, most of that fabric has been replaced by apartment towers, several of them among the tallest in Malta. The Point shopping centre opened at Tigné Point in early 2010 on the site of the demolished British barracks, keeping a run of the old arcading in the square outside; the Fort Cambridge blocks behind it were finished in 2012. Bisazza Street and Tower Road carry the shops. The trade-offs are visible: traffic, scarce parking, and near-permanent construction noise somewhere in earshot.

Getting there and getting across. The Sliema Ferries landing on the Strand is the practical heart of the town. Passenger boats run to Valletta in about five minutes, crossing the harbour far faster than any bus, and the same quay is where harbour cruises and the seasonal fast boats to Comino and Gozo load. Bus routes converge on the Ferries and on Savoy, linking Sliema to Valletta, the airport, St Julian's and the north. Distances within the town are walkable — the whole seafront circuit from the Ferries around Tigné and up to Balluta is an easy hour on foot — which is fortunate, because driving here is unrewarding and parking close to the water is close to impossible in summer.

Timing and conditions. Late spring and early autumn are the strongest windows: sea temperatures still comfortable, hotel rates lower than the August peak, and the promenade usable in the middle of the day. August brings heat, humidity and the largest crowds, but also the fireworks season, and the Strand is one of the better places on the island to watch displays go up over the harbour. In winter the northeasterly gregale drives spray clean over the Tower Road parapet and closes the swimming zones, though the town keeps working year-round — one of the few Maltese resorts that does not shut down out of season.