A country · 214 places · 6 regions
Malta, all of it.
214 curated places across 6 regions — photographed, mapped, and noted with the season each is best in.
The 4 biggest regions — Port Region, Gozo Region (Għawdex), Northern Region and Western Region — read below as chapters, with 2 more waiting past them.
Chapter I · Port Region · 45 places
Port Region
Valletta occupies the spine of the Sciberras peninsula, a limestone ridge roughly a kilometre long and 600 metres across that pushes northeast into the Mediterranean and splits the sea into two deep inlets: the Grand Harbour on the southeastern flank, Marsamxett Harbour on the northwestern one. The walled city covers about 0.8 square kilometres and holds only some five thousand residents, which makes it the smallest capital in the European Union and one of the densest historic cores anywhere in Europe. The ground climbs from the land front at the southwestern end to around 56 metres near Castille Place, then falls away again toward Fort Saint Elmo at the tip. Every corner of the city is within a twenty-minute walk of every other corner, and from a remarkable number of those corners the street simply ends in open water. Built out of a siege. In 1565 an Ottoman expeditionary force besieged Malta for nearly four months and was beaten off. The Order of St John, which had held the islands since 1530, understood that its cramped position at Birgu across the harbour would not survive a second attempt, so Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette laid the foundation stone of an entirely new fortified city on the empty ridge opposite on 28 March 1566. Pope Pius V sent the military engineer Francesco Laparelli, who had worked under Michelangelo at St Peter's, to draw the plan. Laparelli left the island in 1569 and his Maltese assistant Girolamo Cassar carried the work through, designing the conventual church, the Grand Master's palace and most of the auberges that housed the Order's national divisions. De Valette died in 1568 and never saw the place finished. He lies in the crypt of the church he ordered built. A grid dropped onto a hill. Laparelli's layout is rectilinear, which was ambitious for the 1560s and unusual for a fortress town. The original intention was to shave the ridge flat; the cost proved impossible, so the grid was simply laid over the natural slope. The consequence shapes every walk here. The long streets running the length of the peninsula stay reasonably level, while the cross streets drop down both flanks in flights of broad, shallow steps cut from globigerina limestone. Republic Street, the Strada Reale of the Order and the Kingsway of the British, runs the full length as the main artery. Merchants Street parallels it one block toward the Grand Harbour and still carries an open-air stall market on weekday mornings. Old Bakery Street and Old Theatre Street run the same way on the Marsamxett side. Street corners are chamfered and carry carved stone niches with saints, many still lit at night, and above them hang the closed timber balconies, painted green, maroon or dove grey, that arrived on these facades long after the buildings themselves. Inside the walls. The land front is the most concentrated piece of military engineering on the island: a rock-cut ditch, a curtain wall, and two vast cavaliers, Saint James and Saint John, rising behind it to command the approach. UNESCO inscribed the city in 1980, counting some 320 registered monuments inside 55 hectares. Within a few blocks of each other stand the Co-Cathedral of St John with its Caravaggio, the Grand Master's Palace, seven surviving auberges, the Manoel Theatre, the Sacra Infermeria hospital of the Order, and two clifftop gardens hanging over the harbour. The Order's water cisterns, grain silos and gunpowder magazines are still under the pavement. The modern layer. Valletta took roughly 25,000 tons of Axis bombs between 1940 and 1943. The Royal Opera House was destroyed in a raid on 7 April 1942 and left as a ruin for seventy years; the George Cross was awarded to the island a week later, on 15 April. The wound at the city entrance was finally closed in 2015 by Renzo Piano's scheme, which replaced the gate with a bare 60-metre breach flanked by sheer stone blades, set a new Parliament House on stilts beside it with facades milled from local stone into a pitted, shadowed surface, and left the opera house shell as an open-air auditorium, Pjazza Teatru Rjal. The city was European Capital of Culture in 2018, which funded the restoration of the covered market and pulled bars back into Strait Street, once the sailors' quarter. Getting there and timing. Malta International Airport is about eight kilometres away, twenty minutes by taxi. Almost every island bus route terminates at the Triton Fountain terminus just outside the gate, and the Valletta ferries cross to Sliema and to the Three Cities in under ten minutes for a couple of euro, which is also the best way to see the walls from the water. Cruise ships berth at the Waterfront directly below. Summer is punishing on treeless streets that reflect heat from every surface, and the city empties on Sundays. Spring and late autumn are the reasonable windows; the light in the last hour before sunset turns the limestone the colour of honey, which is when the harbour terraces earn their reputation.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter II · Gozo Region (Għawdex) · 38 places
Gozo Region (Għawdex)
Gozo lies at the northwestern end of the Maltese archipelago, about five kilometres of open water beyond Malta's Marfa Ridge, with the smaller island of Comino wedged into the channel between them. It covers roughly 67 square kilometres — some fourteen kilometres from Mġarr harbour in the east to the Dwejra cliffs in the west, and barely seven across at its widest — and carries a population of around 37,000. The map is deceptive. Nothing on the island is more than a twenty-minute drive from anything else, yet Gozo reads as far larger on the ground, because the terrain keeps dropping into valleys and rising again into flat-topped hills, so the horizon resets every few hundred metres and each village believes itself to be somewhere separate. The rock it is made of. The island is a layer cake, and the layers explain everything above them. A hard cap of Upper Coralline Limestone sits on a band of soft blue clay, which in turn rests on Globigerina Limestone. Water sinks through the hard cap, hits the impermeable clay and emerges as springs along the hillsides — which is why the villages sit where they do and why the flat-topped conical hills of Xagħra, Nadur, Għammar and Ta' Dbieġi all share the same silhouette. Ta' Dbieġi, above San Lawrenz, is the high point at about 194 metres. Between the hills, the land is terraced into small fields held up by dry rubble walls built without mortar, with prickly pear hedges standing in for fencing and carob trees marking field corners. A very long occupation. Ġgantija, on the Xagħra plateau, was raised somewhere around 3600 BC, which makes it older than the pyramids at Giza and among the oldest free-standing built structures anywhere. Greek tradition placed Ogygia here, the island where Calypso kept Odysseus for seven years, and a cave above Ramla Bay still carries her name. Under Carthage and Rome the island was Gaulos or Gaudos; the Arabic period left the modern Maltese name Għawdex, still the only name locals use among themselves. The defining trauma came in July 1551, when an Ottoman force under Sinan Pasha and the corsair Turgut Reis broke into the Cittadella and carried off almost the entire population into slavery — several thousand people, effectively emptying the island. Gozo was repopulated slowly over the following decades, and a law requiring everyone to sleep inside the citadel walls stayed in force until 1637. Fourteen councils, fourteen festas. Administratively Gozo is divided into fourteen localities — Victoria, Xagħra, Nadur, Xewkija, Żebbuġ, Għajnsielem, Qala, Munxar, Sannat, Kerċem, Fontana, Għarb, Għasri and San Lawrenz — and each has a parish church whose dome or twin towers is visible from the others. The summer calendar is a rolling sequence of village festi, each with street illuminations, marching bands, ground fireworks and a titular statue carried shoulder-high. The rivalry is real and specific: Victoria alone maintains two band clubs, La Stella and Leone, founded within a year of each other in the 1860s, each with its own opera house. What the island produces. Gozo still farms and still fishes, and the produce is genuinely distinct rather than a marketing story. Ġbejniet are small round cheeselets of sheep or goat milk, eaten fresh, dried, or peppered and cured in vinegar. Sea salt is still raked by hand from rock-cut pans on the north coast between Qbajjar and Xwejni, worked by the same families for generations. Nadur is known for its citrus, Kerċem and the Lunzjata valley for vegetables, and small Gozitan vineyards for reds and whites made from Gellewża and Ġirgentina alongside international grapes. Honey, capers, sun-dried tomatoes and hand-made lace round out the list. On screen. The Dwejra coast on the west side supplied the backdrop for the Dothraki wedding in the first season of Game of Thrones, filmed in 2010 with the Azure Window arch standing behind the crowd — the arch collapsed into the sea during a storm on 8 March 2017, so the scene is now a record of something that no longer exists. The narrow creek of Mġarr ix-Xini, below Xewkija, was the setting for By the Sea, the 2015 film Angelina Jolie wrote, directed and starred in with Brad Pitt, with a set built at the head of the inlet and later removed. Getting there and timing. The Gozo Channel ferry runs between Ċirkewwa on Malta's northern tip and Mġarr on Gozo, a crossing of about 25 minutes, roughly every 45 minutes by day and less often overnight; fares are collected only when leaving Gozo, so the outbound trip feels free. A faster passenger catamaran connects Valletta's Grand Harbour with Mġarr in around 45 minutes. Buses fan out from the terminus in Victoria, but the island rewards a rented car or serious walking shoes. April to early June and mid-September into November give warm sea, wildflowers or grape harvest, and far fewer people than the August peak.
✦ April to June, September to October · $$
Chapter III · Northern Region · 38 places
Northern Region
Golden Bay — il-Mixquqa in Maltese, and formerly Military Bay in English — is a sandy cove on the northwest coast of Malta, at the seaward end of a valley below the hamlet of Manikata. It faces west-northwest, which is the single most important thing about it: this is one of the few beaches on the island where the sun sets directly over the water, and the reason the sand fills every evening in summer with people who have no intention of swimming. The bay is bracketed by clay slopes and low headlands, with Għajn Tuffieħa Bay 345 metres to the south beyond a rocky point, and the protected coastline of Majjistral Park running north. The beach itself. The sand is pale and coarse, peppered with small pebbles at the waterline, and the shore shelves gently enough that swimmers can walk out rather than jump. Lifeguards are on duty through the summer months and a marked swimming zone is buoyed off from the water-sports area. The bay is exposed to the northwest, and that exposure is the thing visitors most often underestimate: when a swell is running, the shorebreak here is heavy, and the currents that develop off the headlands can pull a swimmer sideways and out. Red-flag days are common in autumn and the flags are worth taking seriously. What sits above it. The southern slope carries a large cliff-top hotel opened in the mid-2000s, whose terraces look straight down the bay; beach clubs, kiosks and sunbed concessions occupy the sand itself, and a bus terminus and car park sit immediately behind. The Għajn Tuffieħa international scout campsite is a short distance inland and runs year-round. On the northern side, the ground rises into the garrigue of Majjistral Nature and History Park, declared in 2007 and covering six kilometres of protected coast within the Natura 2000 network — clay slopes, sand dune remnants, boulder scree and rocky steppe holding more than 350 species of wild plant, among them the endemic Maltese pyramidal orchid that serves as the park's emblem. Coastal defence, again. The bays here were an obvious landing point, and history bears that out. In May 1565 the Ottoman fleet anchored off Mejjiesa, Mixquqa, Għajn Tuffieħa and Ġnejna before moving round to Marsaxlokk to begin the Great Siege. Grand Master Lascaris laid the first stone of Għajn Tuffieħa Tower on the cliff south of the bay in 1637. Toward the end of the Order's rule, coastal entrenchments were run above the sand to make a landing here harder, and the British later took over a large tract of surrounding farmland for a Royal Marines training centre, adding camouflaged concrete beach posts in 1935 and an anti-aircraft battery during the war. On screen. The production that most visibly used this bay is The Devil's Double (2011), which filmed at the resort hotel above Golden Sands among a long list of Maltese locations. The neighbouring bay at Għajn Tuffieħa and its tower have their own credits, including the Disney thriller Trenchcoat (1983) and the action feature Black Eagle (1988) with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the whole stretch of coast has been used repeatedly for advertising and television work because it delivers open sand, cliffs, a watchtower and no modern building in the frame. Walking from the sand. Golden Bay is the best starting point for the coastal walk south. A path climbs the headland, drops to Għajn Tuffieħa down a staircase of around 200 steps, and continues over the next ridge to Ġnejna Bay — roughly an hour and a half end to end, with the Roman baths at Għajn Tuffieħa, the Lascaris tower and a series of clifftop viewpoints along the way. Northward the park paths run through garrigue toward Anchor Bay and Popeye Village. Neither route has shade or water. Getting there and timing. Bus 44 from Valletta and 101 from Mellieħa terminate at the bay, a journey of around 50 minutes from the capital; the car park fills by mid-morning at weekends between June and September. Facilities are good by Maltese beach standards — showers, toilets, sunbed and umbrella hire, kiosks and a couple of restaurants — and a ramp gives partial access down to the sand, though the last stretch is soft. May, June, September and early October are the best months for swimming and space. The bay's real signature, though, is any clear evening at any time of year, when the light goes copper on the clay slopes and the whole beach turns to face the horizon.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter IV · Western Region · 21 places
Western Region
Mdina stands on a limestone plateau close to the geographic centre of Malta, roughly 12 kilometres west of Valletta and about 150 metres above the sea. The site was chosen for its sightlines. From the northern bastions the land drops away across the full width of the island, so the dome of the Mosta Rotunda, the long ridge carrying the Victoria Lines, the inlets of St Paul's Bay and, in clear weather, the spires of Valletta all fall inside a single sweep of view. The walled city is small — a rough triangle of some nine hectares — and on its landward flank a deep rock-cut ditch separates it from Rabat, the town that was once its suburb. Almost everything above ground is honey-coloured globigerina limestone, cut from quarries within a few kilometres of where it now stands. Three thousand years of capital. The plateau was settled in the Bronze Age, fortified by Phoenician settlers who knew it as Maleth, and enlarged by Rome into the municipium of Melite, a city perhaps three times the area of the present walls and reaching well into modern Rabat. The decisive change came after the Aghlabid conquest of 870. The new rulers pulled the perimeter back to the defensible tip of the plateau and cut the ditch that still divides the two towns; the shrunken citadel became medina, the walled city, and the excluded suburb became rabaḍ, hence Rabat. Norman, Angevin and Aragonese rule followed, and in 1428 the islanders bought back their freedom from feudal pledge, for which Alfonso V granted the city the title Città Notabile. When the Order of St John arrived in 1530 it chose the harbour at Birgu instead, and Mdina became the quiet seat of the Maltese nobility, the cathedral chapter and the town council. The 1693 rupture. The earthquake that flattened south-eastern Sicily in January 1693 shook Mdina hard, bringing down the medieval cathedral and cracking much of the town. Reconstruction under Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena in the 1720s gave the city its second face. His French military engineer, Charles François de Mondion, rebuilt the whole south-eastern front: a new Baroque main gate in 1724, the Magisterial Palace on the square inside it, the Torre dello Standardo signal tower and the Corte Capitanale, the courthouse whose open loggia carries the motto Legibus et Armis. The result is the city's defining quality — a medieval street plan of deliberately crooked, shaded lanes wearing an eighteenth-century Baroque mask at its entrance. Walking Villegaignon Street. The main spine runs from the gate to the northern bastions and takes about ten minutes on foot if nothing detains you. Casa Inguanez, seat of Malta's oldest titled family, sits near the start. Palazzo Santa Sofia carries a claim to be the oldest building in the city, its lower course traditionally dated 1233. Halfway along, the street opens into St Paul's Square before the cathedral, then narrows again past Palazzo Falson and the Carmelite priory, where in September 1798 the confiscation and auction of church property triggered the Maltese uprising against Napoleon's garrison. At the far end, Bastion Square gives the view, with a café terrace built into the parapet. Side lanes such as Mesquita Square and Triq is-Sur are worth the detour precisely because they lead nowhere. The Silent City. Fewer than three hundred people live inside the walls. Vehicle access is restricted to residents, deliveries and weddings, so the dominant sounds are footsteps, church bells and the hooves of the karozzin horse cabs that wait outside the gate. The nickname earns itself twice a day: once in the early morning before the coaches arrive, and again after the last day-trippers leave, when the lamps come on and the limestone turns amber. Only a handful of buildings are open to the public — the cathedral and its museum, Palazzo Falson, the natural history museum and the Carmelite church — which means Mdina is experienced chiefly as a place to walk rather than to tour. On screen. The first season of Game of Thrones used Mdina for the exteriors of King's Landing. The main gate and its bridge served as the city gate the royal party rides through, and the small enclosed square of Pjazza Mesquita appears in the street scenes around Littlefinger's establishment. Production moved to Croatia afterwards, which makes the Maltese footage a single-season curiosity, and the corner is still identifiable from the show. Getting there and timing. Buses 51, 52 and 53 run from Valletta to Rabat in about 35 minutes; from the terminus it is a five-minute walk across Howard Gardens and over the ditch. Cars have to be left in Rabat. Spring and late autumn are the comfortable seasons; July and August combine heat with the thickest cruise-ship traffic. Evening visits are the reward, since the restaurants inside the walls stay open after the crowds have gone.
✦ March to May, October to November · $$
Regions of Malta
Every place in Malta
