Tag Archives: Valletta

“Valletta equals in its noble architecture, if it does not excel, any capital in Europe. The city is one of the most beautiful, for its architecture and the splendour of its streets that I know: something between Venice and Cadiz.”  – Benjamin Disraeli

We have been to Malta several times, we like it but we have always stayed in a favourite hotel in the north of the country at the town of Mellihea but that hotel has been sold and demolished and the site is being redeveloped so this time we went south and stayed first of all  in Sliema just across the Grand Harbour and the capital city of Valletta (the smallest capital in the European Union by the way).

On the first morning the weather looked disappointingly unreliable so after breakfast we made our way from the apartment and to the waterfront, where it started to rain and so we sheltered. had a drink and pondered what to do.

As we pondered the sky cleared, the clouds scattered and the sun made an appearance so we decided to walk around the harbour to Valletta, it didn’t look so very far away and so we set off.  It turned out to be quite a bit further than we anticipated because what we failed to take into account is that the Grand Harbour has a lot of creeks and bays and each one has to be walked around rather than over (no bridges).

It was an interesting walk along traditional harbour front properties mostly now abandoned and falling into disrepair and waiting for redevelopment into luxury harbour side apartments which is rather a shame watching the past slip away but then again people want improvement, they want swanky modern apartments rather than the one hundred year old dinosaur buildings and who can really blame them.  Heritage matters but not when land values are soaring and land is at a premium in Malta.

Eventually we arrived in the city.  Valletta was built by the Knights of St John who were granted the island in 1530, seven years after being expelled from Rhodes by the Ottoman Turks.  Trouble with Turks however continued to follow the Knights and in 1565 the Ottomans laid siege to their new home on Malta with the intention of establishing a base from where they could conveniently advance into Europe.  But as in Rhodes and at Bodrum the Knights proved a tough nut to crack and the Great Siege of Malta which lasted from May until September ended with the defeat and retreat of the Turkish army.

The rest of Europe was so grateful for this stoic resistance that it began to provide funding for the Grand Master of the Order, Jean Parisot de Valette, to plan and construct a new fortified city that was to be called Valletta in his memory.

This is he…

Although it was designed principally as a fortress city with great battlements and armed bastions the architects also paid attention to good design and within the walls they built a Baroque style city with churches, palaces and fine mansions, laid down gardens and designed grand plazas at the intersections of the grid pattern of the streets.  Disraeli called it “a city built by gentlemen for gentlemen”.  Sadly much of medieval Malta was destroyed in the bombing raids of the Second-World-War and although it took a long time to recover it was named the European Capital of Culture for 2018.

We walked through the city main gate which isn’t a gate anymore, just a modern interpretation of what a gate might have looked like.  Not at all like a gate in my estimation. And then down Republic Street which undulates like a giant roller coaster and is flanked on either side by expensive shops and boutiques.  This is probably on account of the fact that the ugly cruise ships stop here now and all of the passengers are regularly emptied onto the quay side to go shopping and marauding through the main streets.

It was almost ten years since our first visit to Valletta and on that occasion the fort was closed for restoration but it was open today so we purchased tickets (seniors rate)  and explored inside.  The fort has defended the Grand Harbour for almost six hundred years and was well worth the visit but the best part was the audio/visual display of the history of Malta.  Well worth the entrance fee.

Leaving the fort we now had to run the gauntlet of the pushy drivers waiting to ambush people with their flotilla of horse drawn carriages called Karrozzins, they look seductive but they are terribly expensive.  They are equine taxis and I never trust a taxi driver.

So we said no thank you several times and set about walking around the waterside edge of the Grand Harbour accompanied for a while by an elderly man, an ex British serviceman who had been stationed in Malta at the end of the war and was struggling to be able to find his bearings through a faded memory.

Not surprising really.  It is said that Malta was the most bombed place in Europe with relentless air raids every day for over two years.  This naturally destroyed Valletta and other parts of the island so most of what we see now has been reconstructed since 1945.  

We could have walked back but it was a long way so we elected instead to take the Sliema ferry which only took ten minutes.  By the time we walked back to the apartment, changed and returned to the town centre for evening meal (and back) we had walked fourteen miles in total.