Paola, Malta

Where it sits. Paola occupies the ridge and slope on the inland side of the Grand Harbour, about four kilometres from Valletta, hemmed in by Tarxien to the east, Fgura to the southeast, Marsa to the west and the Corradino heights above the harbour to the north. Maltese speakers call it Raħal Ġdid, the new village, and the two names between them contain the town's entire history: it was a planned foundation, laid out deliberately rather than grown from a hamlet, and it is still known by the name of the man who ordered it.

The story behind it. In 1626 Grand Master Antoine de Paule authorised a new settlement on this ground to house workers and families associated with the fortification programme around the Three Cities, and the town that resulted took his name. It was one of very few genuine urban foundations in Malta outside Valletta and Floriana, and its early plan — a square, a church, streets laid to a grid — is still legible under the modern town. Growth came with the naval dockyard in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Paola became a dockyard town, working-class, dense and politically active, and it suffered accordingly during the bombing of 1941 and 1942, when the harbour and the yards were the primary targets.

The Hypogeum. In 1902, workmen cutting cisterns for new houses broke through into a rock-cut chamber and then into a whole subterranean complex. What they had found was the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, a Neolithic underground burial and ritual structure carved on three levels out of the living globigerina limestone, in use for well over a millennium from around 4000 BC, containing the remains of thousands of individuals along with ochre-painted ceilings and chambers cut to imitate the architecture of the temples built above ground. It is inscribed as a World Heritage Site and is now the most tightly rationed monument in Malta: admission is limited to a small number of visitors per day in timed groups, with a controlled microclimate, and tickets sell out weeks or months in advance. The entrance is an unremarkable doorway in an ordinary residential street, which is part of what makes the visit so strange.

The church and the cemetery. Paola's square is dominated by the church of Christ the King, a monumental twentieth-century building designed by Ġużè Damato and constructed over several decades from the 1920s, with a vast dome and a scale that dwarfs the streets around it. On the western edge of the town, the Santa Maria Addolorata Cemetery — laid out between 1862 and 1869 to designs by Emanuele Luigi Galizia — climbs a hillside in terraces of neo-Gothic chapels, cypresses and family tombs around a central church, and is one of the most atmospheric pieces of Victorian landscape design in the Mediterranean. It remains Malta's principal cemetery and is open to visitors who behave with appropriate restraint.

What you actually see today. Paola is a dense, busy, ordinary town: a large square with cafés and a market, streets of terraced houses, the imposing bulk of Christ the King, and heavy traffic on the Valletta and Żabbar roads. It is also the site of one of Malta's largest wineries, whose cellars sit near the town, and the industrial heights of Corradino carry the prison and a scatter of prehistoric remains at Kordin. Visitors come primarily for the Hypogeum and often see nothing else, which is a pity: the square in the early evening, the cemetery on a winter afternoon and the walk east into Tarxien, where the megalithic temples stand among the houses, together make a coherent half-day.

Getting there and timing. Paola is exceptionally well served by bus from Valletta and from the Three Cities, and the journey takes ten to fifteen minutes; driving is possible but parking around the square is difficult. The Hypogeum is the fixed point of any visit and should be booked as far ahead as possible directly with the national heritage agency — a small number of same-week tickets are sometimes released at the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, but relying on that is a gamble. Spring and autumn are the pleasant seasons, though the Hypogeum's interior is constant and cool year-round. Combine it with the Tarxien Temples, five minutes' walk away, which are open on ordinary tickets and give the above-ground context for what is carved beneath the streets.