Mqabba

Where it sits. Mqabba — L-Imqabba in Maltese — is a compact village of about 3,700 people on the southern limestone plateau, ringed by Qrendi, Żurrieq, Kirkop and Safi and lying two kilometres south of Malta International Airport. It keeps the classic Maltese village plan: a dense knot of narrow streets wrapped tightly around a central square and a single dominant parish church, with the fields beginning immediately at the edge of the last houses. The village motto, Non nisi per ardua — nothing except through difficulty — is carved on the coat of arms, and it fits a settlement whose historic economy was cutting stone out of the ground by hand.

Stone. Mqabba sits on the best globigerina limestone in the Maltese islands, and the landscape around the village is pitted with quarries: deep, sheer-sided rectangular pits, some abandoned and flooded, some still working, cut down thirty metres or more into rock so soft when freshly exposed that it can be sawn, and which hardens on contact with air. Much of Valletta, much of the Baroque church architecture of the south, and a very large proportion of ordinary Maltese housing came out of this ground and the neighbouring workings at Qrendi and Ta' Kandja. The quarries have a second life as a fossil source; extinct animal remains have been recovered from workings at Ta' Kandja and Tax-Xantin on the village outskirts.

Under the village. The soft rock also made Mqabba easy to dig into, and it holds two sets of underground remains. In 1860 a group of late Roman rock-cut tombs was found in what is now Diamond Jubilee Square: the Mintna catacombs, an early Christian hypogeum whose central feature is a circular agape table carved from the living rock, where mourners took a commemorative meal beside the graves. They are among the more complete small catacomb groups on the island. Separately, on the periphery of the village near a working quarry, a natural cave at a site known as Bur Megħeż produced burials spanning the late Neolithic into the temple period. During the Second World War the villagers cut extensive air raid shelters into the same rock beneath their houses, a network that survives under parts of the built-up area.

The church and the two feasts. The parish church of the Assumption stands at the centre of the village and is its landmark, a Baroque building with a high dome that anchors every view of Mqabba from the surrounding fields. Its titular statue of the Assumption was carved by Alessandro Farrugia in 1836 and was given a silver bier in 1928 in place of the original wooden one. Like many Maltese villages, Mqabba is divided between two rival band clubs occupying opposite sides of the square, each with its own feast: the Assumption on 15 August, and Our Lady of the Lilies — il-Madonna tal-Ġilju — on the third Sunday of June. The rivalry is expressed in street decoration, statuary, music and, above all, in explosives.

Fireworks, seriously. Mqabba's two pyrotechnic factories are among the most accomplished in a country where firework-making is a competitive art form. The St Mary factory won the first Malta International Fireworks Festival in 2006 and took the Caput Lucis world championship at Valmontone, near Rome, in 2007, competing against the leading houses of Italy, Spain and Portugal. The Lily factory built a self-propelled vertical Catherine wheel measuring just over thirty-two metres in diameter and fired it on 18 June 2011, taking a Guinness world record. Both feasts run multi-day programmes of ground and aerial displays, with the largest event on the eve. The ground fireworks — rotating mechanised set pieces mounted on frames in the square — are the local speciality and are unlike anything commonly seen elsewhere in Europe.

Getting there and timing. Buses from Valletta take around forty minutes; the village is about five kilometres from the airport and easily combined with Qrendi, Ħaġar Qim and the Blue Grotto in a single day by car. Outside the feast periods Mqabba is very quiet, with almost no tourist infrastructure — a few bars on the square, a bakery, no hotels — which is much of its interest for anyone who wants an ordinary Maltese village rather than a curated one. The two feast weeks are the exception: streets are closed, the population multiplies and accommodation anywhere nearby is scarce. Spring and autumn give the best walking weather for the quarry lanes and the field paths towards Qrendi.