Manikata

Where it sits. Manikata is a small farming settlement on the northwest coast of Malta, inside the boundary of Mellieħa, on high ground between the Pwales valley and the sea. Golden Bay lies a kilometre and a half west, Għajn Tuffieħa just beyond it, and the garrigue of Majjistral Park runs north along the coast. The village looks over the valley between il-Ballut and il-Manikata, a patchwork of small terraced fields worked more or less continuously for centuries. It is genuinely small — a few hundred residents, roughly a thousand counting the newer villas — and it is one of the few places in Malta where the working agricultural landscape still surrounds the houses on every side.

A modernist church that changed Maltese architecture. The reason Manikata appears in architecture books far out of proportion to its size is the parish church of St Joseph. Designed by Richard England from 1962 and built through to the mid-1970s, it broke completely with the Baroque-derived template that every other Maltese village church follows. Instead of a domed Latin cross with twin bell towers, England produced a low, curving, sculptural mass of rough local stone that steps up the slope, its forms drawn from the girna — the corbelled dry-stone field hut of the Maltese countryside — and from the terraced field walls around it. Light enters through concealed slots rather than large windows. The building was designed in dialogue with the Second Vatican Council's liturgical reforms and with the parish itself, and it is now regarded as the single most important work of modern architecture in Malta. Seen from the coast road it reads less as a church than as an outcrop.

Farming country. Agriculture is still the main occupation. The valleys here produce grapes, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, melons and watermelons, oranges, pomegranates and strawberries, and there is a strong local beekeeping tradition — Maltese thyme honey from this coast is a recognised product. Field names still in daily use — il-Ġnien ta' Għajn Tuffieħa, il-Wilġa, il-Miżieb, ix-Xagħra l-Ħamra, the red garrigue — describe the land better than any map. The parish feast of St Joseph falls on the last Sunday of August, preceded by Lejla Sajfija għaż-Żiffa, a summer evening on which villagers put out their own produce, wine, oil, honey, crafts and music.

A landscape stitched with history. Cart ruts — the parallel grooves cut into bare limestone by a prehistoric transport system nobody has fully explained — run across the ground around Manikata, one line emerging from the trees at Miżieb, passing near the parish church and continuing toward the cliffs above Mejjiesa. Roman tombs are scattered through the fields, some cut away by later terracing, some absorbed into caves used as stores; several were pressed into service as air-raid shelters in the Second World War. At Tal-Qargħa, northeast of the church, walls of large stones and an old quarry suggest a Bronze Age hilltop settlement of the type better known at Borġ in-Nadur.

The military century. From 1902 the Admiralty took over a large area of Manikata and Għajn Tuffieħa farmland for a Royal Marines training centre, with ranges and quarters; through the First World War it filled with tents and served as a military hospital, staffed in part by women from the village. In 1935, with an Italian invasion thought possible, the British built camouflaged concrete beach posts — one near Għajn Tuffieħa Tower, another near the Razzett tal-Qasam — and added more, with searchlights, as the Second World War went on, along with an anti-aircraft battery above the Għajn Tuffieħa gardens and a pillbox behind the camp. The presence of the base made the village a bombing target, and residents sheltered in rock-cut chambers, caves and Roman tombs.

Walking and the park. Majjistral Nature and History Park, declared in 2007, begins at Golden Bay and runs northeast along six kilometres of protected coast to il-Prajjet. Its paths cross garrigue, clay slopes and dunes holding over 350 species of wild plant, including the endemic Maltese pyramidal orchid — the park's emblem — and thyme that colours whole slopes violet in June. Għajn Żnuber Tower, a nineteenth-century lookout later used as a wartime signal post, has been restored within the park.

Getting there and timing. Bus 44 from Valletta and 101 from Mellieħa serve Manikata and Golden Bay; the village is a twenty-minute walk above the beach. Spring is the season — green fields, orchids, comfortable walking and clear light on the church. Summer afternoons are shadeless, and most visitors head straight past the village to the sand.