Manoel Island

Where it sits. Manoel Island is a low, flat, leaf-shaped island of roughly a third of a square kilometre lying in the middle of Marsamxett Harbour, the northern of Valletta's two great harbours. Sliema Creek runs along its northern side and Lazzaretto Creek along its southern; a road bridge from the Gżira waterfront is the only land access, and administratively the island forms part of Gżira. From the bastions of Valletta the whole of it is laid out below like a model, and from the island itself the capital's walls fill the entire southeastern horizon — which is precisely why the Order of St John spent a century and a half worrying about who might occupy it.

Bishop's Island and the quarantine. In 1570 the island was acquired by the Cathedral Chapter of Mdina and became the property of the Bishop of Malta, which is how it earned its older names: l'Isola del Vescovo, il-Gżira tal-Isqof, the Bishop's Island. Marsamxett had been used for quarantine since 1526, and during the plague of 1592–93 a temporary lazzaretto of wooden huts was thrown up here, then demolished once the outbreak passed. In 1643 Grand Master Giovanni Paolo Lascaris, fearing a new epidemic, acquired the island from the Church in exchange for property at Tal-Fiddien and built a permanent Lazzaretto. Successive Grand Masters — Cotoner in 1670, Carafa in 1683, Perellos in 1701, Vilhena around 1726, de Rohan in 1797 — enlarged it into the sprawling complex whose long arcaded blocks still line Lazzaretto Creek today, roofless in places and derelict for decades.

Who sat out their quarantine here. Because every ship entering the harbour from a suspect port had to discharge its passengers into the Lazzaretto, the guest list is remarkable. Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Benjamin Disraeli, the poet Alphonse de Lamartine and the painter Horace Vernet all did time in these rooms. Vernet, quarantined in 1840, took what are believed to have been the earliest photographs made in Malta, of the parade ground inside Fort Manoel; the plates are now lost. One wing, the Profumo Office, was devoted to fumigating incoming mail, which was sealed with red wax from around 1816 to 1844 and marked with a variety of cachets thereafter — disinfected letters from Malta are a recognised speciality among postal historians. The Lazzaretto served through the plague of 1813–14, the cholera of 1865 and a further plague scare in 1937, took military casualties during the Crimean War, and in 1922 housed refugees from the burning of Smyrna. It remained in health-authority use until 1939.

The fort, and the war. Between 1723 and 1733 the Order finally fortified the island, building Fort Manoel — a four-bastioned Baroque star fort financed by and named after Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena. The British held it from 1800 until 1964. In 1939 the Admiralty requisitioned the Lazzaretto, and between 1941 and 1942 the island served as the shore base for the submarine flotilla operating out of Malta during the siege, which made it a priority target: both the fort and the quarantine buildings were repeatedly bombed and heavily damaged. After the military left, the island slid into thirty years of abandonment, its buildings stripped and its shoreline given over to a boatyard.

A long argument about who owns the view. Fort Manoel was restored between 2001 and 2009 by the concession holder for the island's redevelopment, but the wider plan — apartments, a marina, a hotel — became one of the most contested planning issues in modern Malta, opposed by a sustained public campaign arguing that the island and its foreshore had been promised as public open space. In 2025 the government and the concession holder announced terms intended to return the island to public use as a park, with the detail still being worked through. What that means in practice for access changes from year to year, so it is worth checking before crossing the bridge; the shoreline path and the fort have generally been open, the Lazzaretto has not.

What to do there. Walking the island takes about an hour. The circuit gives the closest ground-level view of Valletta's Marsamxett flank anywhere outside a boat, the glacis and outer works of the fort, the arcades of the Lazzaretto, and the yacht yard with its hauled-out hulls. Late afternoon and the hour after sunset are the strongest light, when the capital's bastions are floodlit and reflected across Sliema Creek. Buses to Gżira stop within five minutes of the bridge, and the Sliema ferry landing is a twenty-minute walk away.