Popeye Village

Where it sits. Popeye Village occupies the whole head of Anchor Bay, a narrow rock inlet called il-Prajjet on the northwest coast of Malta, about 3 km by road from the centre of Mellieħa and reached down a steep lane that ends at a car park on the clifftop. The village is built into the slope on the northern side of the inlet, so the first view of it is from above and slightly behind — a tumble of nineteen crooked timber buildings on stilts, painted in faded ochre, teal and rust, climbing the rock in a way no real settlement ever would. The inlet is small, perhaps 100 metres across, with high limestone sides that shelter it from most weather and give the water an unusually flat, dark green surface.

Built for one film, in seven months. The set was raised for Popeye, the 1980 live-action musical directed by Robert Altman, produced jointly by Paramount and Walt Disney Productions, starring Robin Williams in his first leading film role and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, with songs by Harry Nilsson. Construction began in June 1979. A crew of about 165 people worked for four months; hundreds of logs and several thousand planks were shipped in from the Netherlands, the roof shingles came from Canada, and the build consumed roughly eight tonnes of nails and some 7,600 litres of paint. Because Anchor Bay opens straight onto the northwest swell, a breakwater of 60 to 75 metres was thrown across the mouth of the inlet to protect the standing set. Filming ran from 23 January to 19 June 1980.

What Sweethaven was meant to be. In E. C. Segar's comic strips, Popeye arrives at a scruffy port town looking for his long-lost father, and Altman's designers took that literally: everything in Sweethaven leans, the boardwalks sag, the shopfronts are hand-lettered, and no two roof pitches agree. The film itself divided critics and has since acquired a substantial cult following, but the set turned out to be the more durable asset. Rather than strike it, Malta kept it. It has operated as an open-air attraction since the 1980s and is now one of the country's most visited paid sites — a rare case of a film set outliving the reputation of its film by four decades.

Other productions. Anchor Bay has been reused several times since, notably for the post-apocalyptic Italian production Iron Warrior (1987), which shot at both the village and nearby Selmun, and for sequences in the Tamil feature Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa (2010), which brought a substantial Indian production to the north of Malta.

What you actually see today. The site divides into an upper and a lower complex. The lower village is the original set, with houses you can walk into — several dressed with production props, wardrobe and stills from the shoot — plus the Sweethaven post office, the bakery and the tumbledown pier. A small cinema in the lower complex runs a fifteen-minute programme every hour combining clips from the film with footage of the set going up. Around that core, the site has added the machinery of a family park: costumed characters, a puppet show, a barber sketch, boat trips around the bay in summer, a splash pool, and a viewing platform on the south side of the inlet from which the whole village lines up against the water. Snorkelling and swimming inside the sheltered inlet are possible in the warmer months.

A working reminder that this is a cliff. In February 2023, torrential rain from Cyclone Helios dislodged a large boulder from the cliff above the site, which struck and badly damaged at least one of the set buildings. The attraction had already closed for the storm, so nobody was hurt, and the village reopened on 3 June 2023 after rockfall assessment and repairs. Timber, salt air and an unstable limestone slope mean the set is under permanent maintenance; some of what stands today has been rebuilt more than once.

Getting there and timing. Bus route 101 links Mellieħa to Anchor Bay, and there is a large car park at the top of the access road; the walk down to the entrance is steep and the site itself is built on slopes and boardwalks, so wheeled access is partial at best. Tickets are timed in high season and the site is busiest between 11am and 3pm, when coach parties arrive. Late spring and early autumn give the best combination — warm enough to swim in the inlet, quiet enough to photograph the village without a queue on the boardwalk, and the low afternoon sun lighting the painted facades from the water side.