Selmun Palace

Where it sits. Selmun Palace stands alone on the Selmun peninsula, a blunt headland of farmland and garrigue dividing Mellieħa Bay from Mistra Bay, roughly 3 km east of Mellieħa village and reached by a side road off the main northern route. The building occupies the highest ground on the peninsula, deliberately: from its balcony the land falls away to the cliffs above Imġiebaħ Bay on one side and toward St Paul's Islands on the other, and the villa is visible from the sea long before anything else on this coast. It is one of the most immediately recognisable buildings in northern Malta and one of the most misread — it looks like a fort and never was one.

Built by a ransom fund. The estate belonged to the Monte della Redenzione degli Schiavi, a charitable foundation established in 1607, under Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt, to raise money for ransoming Christians held as slaves by Ottoman and Barbary corsairs. The noblewoman Caterina Vitale left the Selmun lands to the foundation on her death in 1619, and the estate — which also included the Mistra Gate — was let out to knights of the Order who came north to relax and shoot the wild rabbits that were, and still are, abundant on the peninsula. The rents went into the redemption fund. There is a neat symmetry in that: a hunting lodge whose income bought back people taken by the same corsairs whose raids emptied this coast in the first place.

The architecture. The villa itself went up at some point in the eighteenth century — the exact date is unrecorded, and it first appears on a map of 1783 under the name Torre Nuova, the new tower. The architect is unknown; the attribution is usually to Domenico or Tumas Cachia. The design is a square Baroque block with four corner pseudo-bastions, lifted almost directly from the vocabulary of Verdala Palace and the Wignacourt coastal towers. The bastions and the embrasures cut into them are decorative: this building was never intended to hold a gun. But from a corsair's viewpoint offshore it read unmistakably as a military outpost, which was the point — deterrence achieved by set dressing. The main facade has three doorways, the central one framed by a carved portal with an ornate window and a bell-cot above it, and a balcony runs right around the perimeter of the building.

Later lives. During the Maltese uprising against the French at the end of the eighteenth century the British turned the villa into a naval hospital — the earliest building on the island pressed into that role. A semaphore station was installed on it in the 1840s, continuing the site's long habit of watching the sea. The palace entered the Antiquities List in 1925. In the modern era, a large hotel — the Selmun Palace Hotel, owned by a subsidiary of Air Malta — was built immediately beside it, with some suites inside the historic villa itself and a busy trade in weddings. The hotel closed in January 2011 when Air Malta withdrew from non-airline operations, and the complex has stood empty since. The palace was scheduled as a Grade 1 national monument in January 2012 and needs substantial restoration; a chapel carrying the dedication of Our Lady of Ransom, once housed within the villa, was rebuilt as a separate structure alongside it in the 1980s.

On screen. Selmun appears in the location lists of productions working the northern coast, among them the Italian post-apocalyptic feature Iron Warrior (1987), which shot at Selmun as well as at Popeye Village and Anchor Bay. The combination of an isolated Baroque block, bare headland and open sea has kept it in demand for stills and television work even while the building itself has been shut.

The surrounding peninsula. The walk matters as much as the building. Tracks lead from the palace across the headland to the ruins of Fort Campbell, a sprawling low-profile British fort of the late 1930s built to cover the northern approaches and now abandoned to scrub, and down to Imġiebaħ Bay, a small remote sandy cove reachable only on foot or by a rough track. Mistra Bay lies on the southern flank with Mistra Battery of 1761 on its shore, and the cliffs between hold rock-cut features and old field systems.

Getting there and timing. There is no direct bus; the turn-off is served by buses running the main road between Mellieħa and St Paul's Bay, leaving a walk of a kilometre or so. The palace interior is closed and the grounds are semi-derelict, so the visit is exterior only. Autumn through spring is best — the peninsula is green, the light is low and the walk to Imġiebaħ is manageable without shade.