Balzan

Where it sits. Balzan is the middle village of the three that make up Malta's inland cluster, wedged between Attard to the west, Lija to the north and Birkirkara to the east, roughly five kilometres from Valletta. It is small — a few thousand residents and a core that can be crossed on foot in ten minutes — and it is easy to drive through without noticing you have passed from one parish to another, because the three villages have long since grown into a single built-up area. What distinguishes Balzan is that its historic centre survived that growth largely intact. The lanes behind the parish church still follow their pre-industrial lines: narrow, shaded, walled, and mercifully hostile to traffic.

The story behind it. Balzan began as a scatter of farms and small dwellings on land that belonged to the parish of Birkirkara, and it was only in 1655 that it was separated as a parish of its own. The parish church, dedicated to the Annunciation, was built in the decades that followed and finished towards the end of the seventeenth century, with the usual Maltese sequence of a modest first structure enlarged as the village grew richer. Its façade is late Baroque and restrained; the interior holds the titular painting of the Annunciation and the silver and damask that a Maltese parish accumulates over three centuries. From the eighteenth century onward, well-off families from Valletta and the harbour towns built summer residences here for the same reason they built them in Attard and Lija: the inland air was considered healthier, the ground was cheaper, and there was space for a walled garden.

What you actually see today. The pleasure of Balzan is architectural detail at close range rather than any single monument. Walk the streets around Triq il-Kbira and Triq San Duminku and you find flat-fronted townhouses in globigerina limestone with moulded door surrounds, brass door knockers cast as dolphins or lions, enclosed timber balconies painted in the traditional greens and reds, and carved corner niches holding statues of the Virgin or a patron saint. Several eighteenth-century villas survive behind high garden walls, their gateposts topped with stone finials, and glimpses through open gates reveal citrus trees, wells and pergolas. The old core is a designated conservation area, which is why the modern development that surrounds it stops abruptly at the edge of the historic streets.

The Three Villages together. Balzan makes most sense as one leg of a walk rather than as a destination on its own. San Anton Palace and its public gardens sit on the Attard–Balzan boundary and are a few minutes away on foot. Villa Bologna's ticketed gardens and pottery are just beyond. Lija's church square, with its avenue of trees and the nineteenth-century Belvedere folly tower rising above the rooftops, is a similar distance in the other direction. Surviving arches of the Wignacourt Aqueduct, the seventeenth-century water supply built under Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt, run along the roads at the edge of the village. Between them these places tell a coherent story about how inland Malta was settled: water first, then villas, then parishes, then suburbs.

Practical texture. Balzan has no hotels of consequence, no beach and no museum, and that is precisely why it stays quiet. It does have a handful of good neighbourhood restaurants and wine bars, a scattering of village shops, and two band clubs whose premises come alive in July when the parish keeps its feast — street decorations, band marches, a procession with the titular statue, and a fireworks programme let off from the fields at the edge of the built-up area. The Balzan valley, Wied is-Sewda, runs down towards Qormi and Marsa and gives an idea of how the land drained before the suburbs closed over it.

Getting there and timing. Buses from Valletta, Sliema and Birkirkara pass through or close to the village, and Balzan is a fifteen-minute drive from the airport, twenty from the capital. Parking in the old core is tight, so leave the car on the wider streets at the edge. Spring and autumn are the best seasons for walking the Three Villages circuit; midsummer afternoons are hot and the lanes offer only intermittent shade, so start early. Late afternoon is the photographer's hour here, when low sun turns the limestone gold and the shadows in the narrow streets are long enough to give the façades relief.