Gudja

Where it sits. Gudja is a small village of roughly 3,500 people on rising ground in southern Malta, immediately east of Malta International Airport and about six kilometres from Valletta. Its position on a low crest gives it long views south towards Marsaxlokk Bay and north across the plain to the Grand Harbour, and it once made this an obvious place for a mother church. The village motto, pluribus parens — parent of many — records exactly that: Safi, Kirkop, Ħal Farruġ, Luqa, Mqabba, Birżebbuġa and Tarxien were all once served from here, and further parishes budded off from those in turn. Modern Gudja is quiet, largely residential, and edged by the airport perimeter on one side and open fields on the others.

Bir Miftuħ. The reason for the village's outsized ecclesiastical ancestry stands about a kilometre away, beside the airport boundary: the chapel of Santa Marija ta' Bir Miftuħ, a squat, buttressed fifteenth-century church of bare limestone with a stone-slab roof and a small bellcote. Bir Miftuħ — the open well — was already a parish by 1436, one of the earliest documented on the islands, and it covered a huge swathe of southern Malta before the villages within it grew large enough to claim their own churches. Inside, fragments of late-medieval wall painting survive, including part of a Last Judgement, and the plain interior is one of the clearest surviving pictures of what a Maltese parish church looked like before the Baroque rebuilt almost all of them. The chapel is in the care of Din l-Art Ħelwa, opens on limited days and is used for chamber concerts; prehistoric stones lie reused in a rubble wall nearby.

Three bell towers. The parish church that succeeded it, dedicated to the Assumption, is a Baroque building of the seventeenth century with a peculiarity found nowhere else in Malta: it has three bell towers rather than the standard pair. The most conspicuous is the asymmetric neoclassical addition known as the William Baker tower, put up in the nineteenth century and deliberately unmatched to the others. The interior holds a strong collection for a village church — a titular painting of the Assumption by the Roman painter Pietro Gagliardi from 1887, a Death of Saint Joseph by Domenico Bruschi of 1894, and, most importantly, a titular statue of the Assumption carved in solid wood in 1807 by the Maltese sculptor Vincenzo Dimech, the oldest statue of the subject on the islands and still carried through the streets on 15 August.

The tower in the garden. On the edge of the village, in an area called Xlejli, stands one of the strangest structures in southern Malta: a tall, tapering circular tower, built in 1780 on the site of what was probably a Punic-Roman rural tower, and now enclosed within the walled garden of Palazzo Dorell. Its purpose was ornamental and panoramic — a belvedere for a country estate — but its silhouette reads as something far older, and it has been argued over by antiquarians for two centuries. The palace itself has real history: during the Maltese uprising and blockade of the French garrison between 1798 and 1800, it served as headquarters for the British forces under General Thomas Graham. Both tower and palace are private and can only be seen from outside.

Under the fields. The area has been occupied since prehistory, and remains keep surfacing. The Ħal Resqun catacombs, a paleochristian burial complex more than sixteen centuries old, were first investigated by Temi Zammit in 1912, then lost, and were relocated in 2006 by heritage officers working close to the airport; they are notable for carved decoration around one of the entrances. Other prehistoric traces lie near the airport approach. Little of this is presented to visitors, which is characteristic of Gudja — the depth is real but almost entirely undisplayed.

Getting there and timing. Gudja is one of the easiest villages on the island to reach: buses from Valletta take about twenty-five minutes, and the airport is a ten-minute walk from the edge of the village, which makes it a practical and inexpensive base for a first or last night. There is little in the way of restaurants beyond a few bars and a bakery on the square. Walking the core takes half an hour and is best done in the late afternoon, when the limestone warms in colour and the aircraft on approach pass low over the fields. Spring and autumn are the pleasant seasons. Check opening days for Bir Miftuħ in advance, since the chapel is unstaffed for most of the month.