St. Julian's, Malta

Where it sits. St Julian's — San Ġiljan in Maltese — occupies the stretch of northeast coast immediately beyond Sliema, a chain of three inlets strung along about two kilometres of shoreline. Coming from the south you meet Balluta Bay first, then round Spinola Point into Spinola Bay, a narrow, deeply indented creek that bends back on itself; beyond Dragonara Point lies St George's Bay, the only sandy one of the three. Behind them the land rises into the informal districts of Ta' Ġiorni, Tal-Għoqod and St Andrew's, and to the north the ground breaks into the low sea cliffs of Il-Qaliet. The registered population passed 14,700 in 2024, with foreign nationals comfortably outnumbering Maltese ones — a demographic fact you can read directly off the shopfronts.

The story behind it. The town takes its name from Julian the Hospitaller, patron saint of hunters, and the connection is not decorative: this coast was hunting ground under the Knights, and the earliest documented chapel here was recorded in a bishop's visitation of 1601 as having been built in 1580. Permanent settlement really begins with Spinola Palace, raised in 1688 by Fra Paolo Raffaele Spinola on the western arm of the creek that now bears his name, and enlarged in 1733 by his nephew Fra Giovanni Battista Spinola. An inscription over the portico records that it was built for public entertainment. In June 1798 French troops under General Vaubois came ashore at Spinola Bay, making St Julian's the first town in Malta to fall to Napoleon's expedition. Residents petitioned for their own parish in 1854, were refused after objections from Birkirkara, and finally succeeded in 1891.

The bays today. Spinola Bay is the picture most people carry away: brightly painted fishing boats with painted eyes on the bow moored a few metres from restaurant tables, water so enclosed it barely moves, and a ring of buildings rising steeply behind. Richard England's Love sculpture — the word built as four blocky letters, mirrored in the water — sits on the quay and has become the town's most photographed object. Balluta Bay, at the Sliema end, is framed by a Gothic Revival Carmelite church and the Art Nouveau Balluta Buildings of 1928. St George's Bay, at the far end past the Westin, has imported sand, swimming platforms and the shallowest water of the three. A continuous promenade links all of them, and walking the full sequence from Balluta to St George's takes about forty minutes.

Old money and new height. Two very different eras of wealth sit on top of each other here. Dragonara Palace, a neoclassical colonnaded villa of 1870 built as a summer house for the banker Emmanuele Scicluna, became Malta's first casino on 15 July 1964 and still operates as one. Half a kilometre away, the Portomaso Business Tower opened in 2001 at 97.5 metres and twenty-three floors, the tallest building in the country until Mercury Tower — 122 metres, thirty-two floors, one of the last concept designs Zaha Hadid signed off before her death in 2016 — overtook it in 2020. Mercury's twisted section between the tenth and thirteenth floors is visible from most of the Sliema seafront, and the tower is grafted onto the restored 1903 Mercury House, once the hub of Malta's telegraph network.

Feasts, and a greased pole. The parish church, designed by Arturo Zammit with its first stone laid in 1961 and in use from 1968, received Pope John Paul II on his first Maltese visit on 27 May 1990. The summer festa falls on the last Sunday of August and includes two local peculiarities: the ġostra, in which competitors sprint up a greased pole angled out over the harbour to grab one of three flags, generally ending in the water; and the musketterija, revived in 1982, in which hunters fire blank black-powder charges from the church roof as the titular statue emerges.

Getting there and timing. Buses from Valletta, Sliema and the airport all serve St Julian's, and the Sliema–Valletta ferry is a fifteen-minute walk from Balluta. May, June, September and October give warm water without August's density of visitors. The bays face east and northeast, so the best light is in the first two hours after sunrise, when Spinola is empty apart from fishermen. Anyone wanting quiet should note that Paceville, the island's nightlife district, sits immediately behind St George's Bay, and the noise carries downhill on still summer nights.