Għajnsielem

Where it sits. Għajnsielem is the first place most people set foot in on Gozo without realising it, because the ferry terminal at Mġarr and the harbour village around it fall within its boundaries. The settlement itself stands on the slope above the harbour, about three kilometres southeast of Victoria, with the island of Comino — also administratively part of this locality — lying two kilometres offshore across the channel. Around 3,000 people live here. The name means the spring of Salem, or in a common folk reading the spring of peace, after a water source on the road below the village that supplied travellers coming up from the port.

Two churches, seventy years apart. The old parish church of Our Lady of Loreto, a compact building of 1820 with a low dome, still stands in the village square and is still used. Behind and above it rises its replacement, a neo-Gothic church begun in 1924 to a design in the French Gothic manner — pointed arcades, ribbed vaults, a rose window and a tall spire, all executed in Maltese limestone rather than the northern European stone the style assumes. Work continued in stages through the middle of the century as money allowed, and the building was completed in the 1970s. The result is unlike anything else on Gozo, where baroque and neo-classical dominate almost completely, and the spire is a navigational marker for boats entering the harbour.

The fort that was meant to be a city. On the headland west of Mġarr harbour stands Fort Chambray, one of the more revealing failures in Maltese military history. It was begun in 1749 and largely financed by Jacques François de Chambray, a Norman knight of the Order of St John who had made a fortune commanding the Order's galleys. The plan was not merely a fort but a fortified new town that would replace the vulnerable Cittadella as Gozo's principal refuge, with a street grid laid out inside the walls. The defences were completed in the 1760s; the city never materialised beyond a handful of buildings. The British garrisoned it in the nineteenth century, and from 1957 into the 1990s the interior housed a psychiatric hospital. The bastions, the main gate and the chapel survive, and parts of the site have since been redeveloped as housing and hotel accommodation, a process that has been contested locally for decades.

Bethlehem in the fields. Each December, farmland at Ta' Passi on the edge of the village is turned into a full-scale living Nativity village covering several hectares, with reconstructed rubble-walled houses, working bread ovens, olive and grape presses, livestock, and hundreds of costumed villagers of all ages staging trades and daily life through the evenings of Advent. Begun in the 2000s and run by volunteers, Bethlehem f'Għajnsielem has grown into the largest event of its kind in the Maltese islands and pulls visitors across from Malta on the winter ferry, which is otherwise a quiet crossing.

What else is here. The waterfront strip at Mġarr below the village carries the yacht marina, the fishing boats, a row of restaurants along the quay, and the neo-Gothic Lourdes Chapel perched on the cliff above the harbour, built in 1888 and rebuilt after subsidence. Inland, the countryside around Għajnsielem is farmed in small terraced parcels, and the coastal stretch running southwest towards Qala takes in Ħondoq ir-Rummien's shingle beach. The village's largest annual feast is that of Our Lady of Loreto, celebrated in late August with band marches, ground fireworks and the titular statue carried down from the new church to the old one. A second, smaller church dedicated to St Anthony of Padua serves the harbour district.

Getting there and timing. Every Gozo Channel ferry from Ċirkewwa lands within this locality, a crossing of about 25 minutes; the fast catamaran from Valletta arrives at the same quay in around 45 minutes. Buses from the terminal climb through the village on their way to Victoria, ten minutes further on. Ferries to Comino leave from Mġarr in the summer season. December is the village's distinctive month because of the Nativity village; the rest of the year it is a functional, unshowy place that most people pass through at speed on their way inland. The waterfront is flat and easy, but the climb from the harbour to the village square is steep enough to be worth a bus.