Attard

Where it sits. Attard lies in the middle of Malta, about six kilometres west of Valletta, on gently rising ground between Birkirkara and the open plain of Ta' Qali. With Balzan and Lija it forms the Three Villages, a cluster of three separate parishes that grew together in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the wealthier families of the harbour towns built summer houses inland, away from the heat and the epidemics. Attard is the largest and the leafiest of the three. Its Latin motto, which translates roughly as I breathe out a scent of roses, refers to a horticultural reputation that the village still trades on: this is where Malta's flower shows are held and where several of its best-known private gardens survive behind high walls.

The story behind it. People have lived on this ground since the Roman period, and the modern village grew from a scatter of farmsteads around a chapel. Attard became a parish in the early seventeenth century, and its parish church of St Mary was built between roughly 1613 and 1616 to a design by Tommaso Dingli, then a young architect from Attard itself. It is one of the most admired churches on the island for reasons that have nothing to do with size: the façade is a controlled composition of paired pilasters, a carved doorway and a shell niche, executed in fine ashlar and belonging to a Maltese late-Renaissance manner that the Baroque swept away almost everywhere else. Look for the carved rope moulding and the sharpness of the mouldings, which have survived four centuries of weathering remarkably well.

San Anton and Villa Bologna. Attard's two great houses face each other across a short stretch of road. San Anton Palace, begun in the 1620s as a country villa for the future Grand Master Antoine de Paule, became the Governor's residence under British rule and is now the official residence of the President of Malta; its walled gardens, opened to the public in the 1880s, are free, shaded and open daily. Villa Bologna, built in 1745 as a dowry house and still in private family hands, opens its gardens on a ticket: a formal Baroque parterre, a sunken garden, a nymphaeum, and a pottery workshop producing hand-thrown tableware in the old stables. Between them these two gardens make Attard the best place in Malta to understand what the island's landed families did with water, shade and imported plants.

What you actually see today. The historic core around the parish square keeps its narrow streets, limestone townhouses, enclosed wooden balconies and corner niches with painted statues, but Attard is also a prosperous modern suburb with wide avenues, detached villas and gardens — a different Malta from the dense, terraced streets of Ħamrun or Birkirkara. Surviving arcades of the Wignacourt Aqueduct, built between 1610 and 1615 to carry spring water from Rabat and Dingli down to Valletta, run alongside the road towards Balzan and are among the best-preserved stretches left. On the western edge the built-up area stops at Ta' Qali, the flat former wartime airfield that now holds the national stadium, a crafts village, the aviation museum and a large public park, all technically within Attard's boundaries.

Food, feasts and daily life. The village keeps its feast of Santa Marija in mid-August, with street decorations, band marches and fireworks, and there is a second, quieter religious calendar around the smaller chapels. Restaurants here tend to be neighbourhood places rather than tourist ones; the area around the Three Villages has a reputation for good, unhurried Maltese cooking, and the annual horticultural show at San Anton in spring brings cut-flower and produce competitions that are worth timing a visit around.

Getting there and timing. Buses from Valletta, Sliema and Birkirkara towards Rabat and Mdina pass through Attard, and the village is a straightforward twenty-minute drive from the airport. February to May is the strongest season: the citrus flowers, the gardens are green, the horticultural show fills San Anton, and the light is clean. Summer is hot and glaring away from the walled gardens, though the shaded avenues at San Anton stay bearable at any hour. Because the Three Villages run into one another, the most rewarding approach is on foot — start at the Attard parish church, walk through San Anton, cross into Balzan's old lanes and finish at Lija's church square, a route of about two kilometres that takes in three parishes, two great gardens and a Roman-era water system.