Tigné Point

Where it sits. Tigné Point is the blunt tip of the Tigné peninsula, the northern jaw of the entrance to Marsamxett Harbour, at the eastern end of Sliema. Directly opposite, about 600 metres across open water, stands Fort St Elmo on the point of Valletta; the two works between them close the harbour mouth. The peninsula was originally called Punta di Santa Maria, and its extreme tip still carries the name Dragut Point. Because the ground here is level and the promenade runs right around the outer edge, this is the easiest place in Sliema to reach the water's edge in a wheelchair, and the only place where you can stand at sea level and take in Valletta, Manoel Island and the open Mediterranean by turning through a half circle.

A watch post, a siege and a corsair's death. The Maltese militia kept a small watch post on this point as early as 1417, manned by three men. During the Great Siege of 1565 the Ottoman commander Dragut established a battery here to bombard Fort St Elmo across the water, and it was here that he was killed by stray fire from the fort he was shelling — which is why the tip of the peninsula still bears his name. After the siege a chapel to Our Lady replaced an existing wayside niche on the point. In 1757 the Order built Lembi Battery on the northern shore as an outwork of Fort Manoel; it was superseded in 1792 when work began on the fort that gave the peninsula its modern name.

Three generations of gun. Fort Tigné, built between 1793 and 1795, was the last major fortification the Order of St John raised on Malta and one of the earliest polygonal forts anywhere. The British then layered their own defences on top. Cambridge Battery was constructed between 1878 and 1886 at a cost of nearly £19,000 to carry a single 450 mm Armstrong rifled muzzle-loader weighing 100 tons — one of a pair on Malta, the other at Rinella across Grand Harbour, with two more of the same monsters mounted at Gibraltar. Garden Battery followed between 1889 and 1894, filling the ground between Cambridge and the fort with two 6-inch and one 9.2-inch breech-loading guns on disappearing mounts. Around them the British laid out Tigné Barracks and a garrison chapel dedicated to St Luke.

Twenty years of ruin. When the British forces left Malta in 1979 the whole peninsula was abandoned. The barracks and parts of Fort Tigné were stripped and vandalised. Garden Battery was buried under fill and built over, and was widely assumed to have been destroyed. Cambridge Battery, its great gun long since scrapped, was pressed into service in turn as a restaurant, a hotel and a swimming pool. For two decades the point that dominates the entrance to Valletta's second harbour was the most conspicuous derelict site in the country.

What you actually see today. Redevelopment from the late 1990s onward turned the peninsula into a dense modern quarter. The Point shopping centre opened in early 2010 on the footprint of the demolished barracks; a run of the original barrack arcading was retained and now frames Pjazza Tigné outside it. Residential blocks fill the ground behind, and the Fort Cambridge towers, completed in 2012 on the site of the Victorian battery, are among the tallest buildings in Malta. The two heritage survivors are the restored Fort Tigné at the tip and Garden Battery, which was rediscovered during excavation in 2005 after conservation authorities intervened in 2000–2001 to stop it being cut through for a tunnel; its gun emplacements were re-exposed and are intended to anchor a heritage route through the development.

Getting there and timing. Tigné Point is a fifteen-minute walk from the Sliema ferry landing along the Strand, or ten minutes from Bisazza Street through the town. Buses stop on Tigné Seafront. The circuit of the promenade around the point takes about twenty-five minutes at a stroll and is flat, paved and lit, with benches facing the harbour mouth. Photographers work it in the last hour of daylight, when the sun drops behind Valletta and the bastions across the water go from gold to floodlit; the same walk in the early morning gives clean light on Manoel Island and Fort Manoel instead. The point is exposed, and in a winter northeasterly the sea comes over the outer railings.