5 Days in Valletta

From the outside St John's looks plain, almost severe, for a church that holds some of the best Baroque art in Europe. It was built between 1573 and 1578, right after the siege, to a design by the Maltese architect Girolamo Cassar, who designed several of Valletta's main buildings. It was the Order's conventual church, and the showpiece came later: in the 17th century the interior was redecorated in high Baroque style by Mattia Preti and others. It's called a co-cathedral because it shares status with the cathedral in Mdina, which still takes precedence.

Look down first. The nave floor is made of marble tombstones, one for each knight buried below, inlaid with skeletons, coats of arms and scenes of battle. Then go to the Oratory for the main event: Caravaggio's Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, painted in 1608, the largest canvas he ever painted, and next to it his Saint Jerome Writing. It hangs in the room it was painted for, in low light, and that's the difference between seeing it here and seeing it in a book. The audio guide is included and worth using.

Walk five minutes to the edge of the city and the whole Grand Harbour opens below you: the dockyards, Fort St Angelo, and the three fortified towns across the water where the Knights lived before Valletta existed. The arched terraces were built in 1661 by an Italian knight for the Italian members of the Order, and you now get in for nothing. The Barrakka Lift down to the waterline costs 1 EUR.

Stand at the rail a few minutes before noon. On the bastion below, the Saluting Battery fires its guns at 12:00 and 16:00, Monday to Saturday. One of the Ottoman siege batteries stood close to this spot in 1565, and for centuries the guns announced the opening and closing of the city gates and gave passing ships a time signal to check their chronometers. You can watch from the gardens for free, but the 3 EUR ticket gets you into the battery for a closer look. Buy it online, arrive about 15 minutes early, and note it's card only at the gate.

Lunch is a pastry and a coffee at the café that has sat on Republic Street, the spine of the city, since 1944. The Cordina family's café business is older still: it began in 1837 across the harbor in Cospicua and moved to this address after the war.

Order a pastizz (plural pastizzi), the diamond of flaky pastry filled with ricotta or curried peas that Malta eats for breakfast, lunch and in between. At a snack bar they cost 0.30-0.50 EUR; here you pay more, but the café is the point. Sit down, order a coffee and let the morning's marble settle.

Two streets away from the café is the palace where the Order's Grand Masters lived and ruled, and which is still the seat of the Office of the President of Malta. One Heritage Malta ticket covers the State Rooms and the Armoury. The State Rooms are the official halls of the Order's rulers, and the Armoury holds armor and weapons of the Knights' time; it's the part that stays open even when the State Rooms don't.

Expect gaps: the Throne Room is closed until further notice, and the palace can close for state functions. Heritage Malta posts changes on its website and Facebook page.

At the top of Republic Street, next to the City Gate, is a roofless theater that shows what Valletta lost. The Royal Opera House opened here in 1866, burned out in 1873, reopened in 1877 and was one of the most beautiful buildings in the city until German bombers wrecked it in April 1942. For decades nobody agreed what to do with the ruin. In 2013 the architect Renzo Piano turned it into an open-air stage, built around what survived.

It's free to walk through and it tells the war story better than a plaque. Malta was awarded the George Cross for its endurance in 1942, and the ruin is what that looked like in stone.

At 143 St Dominic Street, a few blocks from the Palace, Ta' Nenu (older guidebooks list it as Nenu the Artisan Baker) is a good place for a first proper Maltese dinner. It's best known for its traditional ftira, and the menu has pan-fried rabbit with garlic, slow cooked in white wine, which is the closest thing to the national dish fenkata you can get in the city without leaving it (see the food section).

Booking is smart, and for a same-day table the restaurant asks you to phone (22 581 535).

The fort at the tip of the peninsula is where the Great Siege was decided. In 1565 the Ottoman commanders expected to take St Elmo in about a week, and it held for 28 days, falling on 23 June. A cannon misfire during the bombardment killed a gunner and mortally wounded the Ottoman admiral Dragut, one of their best. Not one knight survived. When the Knights laid out Valletta afterwards, the grid of streets was drawn to run from the City Gate to this fort.

Inside, the National War Museum covers about 7,000 years of Maltese military history in seven sections. Most of it is the Second World War: a Gloster Sea Gladiator nicknamed Faith, President Roosevelt's jeep Husky, and Malta's George Cross. The First World War section is closed until further notice. Walk the ramparts afterwards for the view of the harbor mouth.

From the steps at the water's edge below Valletta's gardens, near the Lascaris Wharf, a dgħajsa will take you across to Birgu. It's the traditional Maltese water taxi, a boat type developed in the 17th century and used to ferry people around the harbors between the 18th and 20th centuries. A few remain, mostly carrying visitors.

It's the nicest way to arrive in Birgu: you come in under the walls of Fort St Angelo the way the Knights and sailors did. The boats leave when there are about six people, so you may wait. The cheaper, regular option is the Valletta Ferry to Cospicua (2 EUR), or bus 2 from the Valletta terminal to Birgu itself.

Before Valletta existed, Birgu was the capital. The Order of St John made it their base from 1530 and stayed until 1571, and the town, known by its victory title Città Vittoriosa, was the real front line of the Great Siege. Walk the narrow lanes up from the waterfront and you're in a town where people still live.

The Inquisitor's Palace was the seat of the Maltese Inquisition from 1574 to 1798, and it's one of the few surviving palaces of its kind and the only one open to the public. It has been a museum since 1966. If you have energy, the Malta Maritime Museum is on the waterfront, and Isla (Senglea) across the creek has the Gardjola Gardens, a lookout over the Grand Harbour.

Eat on the waterfront or in the side streets, and keep it simple: you have a fort and a booked slot ahead. A ftira sandwich or a plate of local food is the right size of lunch. This is also a good point to try imqaret, the deep-fried date pastries flavored with anise, from a stall or a bakery, with coffee afterwards.

Pick a table with a harbor view and look at the menu before you sit: a place that lists the ftira and the day's fish is usually better than one with a photo board.

At the tip of Birgu's headland the fort stands where a medieval castle was, and the Order rebuilt it between the 1530s and 1560s as its headquarters, and it held that role through the Great Siege. The look you see today is mostly from a big rebuild in the 1690s, and the British garrisoned it until 1979, when it was a Royal Navy base known as HMS St Angelo.

Go for the views. From the ramparts you look back at Valletta and Fort St Elmo across the water, the same stretch the two sides fought over in 1565. Since 1998 the upper part of the fort has been in the hands of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

In the suburb of Paola is the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, an underground sanctuary and burial complex from around 3300-3000 BC, with the remains of an estimated 7,000 people documented. Workers digging cisterns for new houses broke through its roof by accident in 1902. Down there is a chamber called the Oracle Room, where a carved niche was possibly designed to carry chanting or drumming through the rest of the rooms.

To protect the rock, only 10 people are allowed in at a time, which is why it sells out. Adult tickets are 35 EUR, a maximum of four per purchase, and children under six are not admitted. Last-minute tickets appear online only one day before, at 50 EUR. Book weeks ahead, more in summer. Bus 85 from Valletta has a stop called Ipogew about 12 minutes out; from Birgu, take bus 2 back to Valletta first or a taxi.

Rabat's best-known pastizzi bar, the Crystal Palace, known as Is-Serkin, sits on St Paul's Street (Triq San Pawl) and has been selling pastizzi since the middle of the 20th century. Sources give 1945 or 1956 for the start.

Choose between tal-irkotta (ricotta) and tal-piżelli (curried peas), and have one of each. Breakfast costs a euro or two, and you'll eat nothing better for the money all week.

The Romans buried their dead outside the city walls, and just outside the walls of the ancient town of Melite, now Mdina and Rabat, they dug a vast cemetery into the rock, now the St Paul's Catacombs. Over 20 of the galleries are open to the public. Here you can walk along corridors lined with baldacchino tombs, free-standing canopied graves, and into two halls with round agape tables cut from the rock for meals in memory of the dead.

One myth worth dropping: the Maltese catacombs were never hiding places for persecuted Christians or living quarters. They were burial grounds, nothing more. It's a strange and quiet place, and it's the best way to feel how old Rabat is.

A short walk toward Mdina's gate takes you to the remains of a Roman townhouse with impressive mosaics, which is the reason the museum was built here. It's small, which is its strength: you see the floors where they were laid, in the place where Melite stood.

After the catacombs, this fills in the other half of the picture: how wealthy Romans lived, rather than how they were buried.

Mdina was Malta's capital from antiquity until the Knights arrived in 1530 and chose Birgu instead. It has barely grown since, and the walls hold only about 240 people, which is where the nickname Silent City comes from. Cars are banned except for residents, so you walk. Enter by the baroque main gate, wander lanes so narrow the stone buildings almost touch, and stop on the bastion terrace, where the whole island opens up in front of you. Game of Thrones used it as King's Landing in its first season.

The cathedral dedicated to St Paul was largely wrecked in the 1693 Sicilian earthquake and rebuilt in the Baroque style by Lorenzo Gafà between 1697 and 1703. A single combined ticket (about 15 EUR, valid for 30 days, from the Cathedral Museum) covers the cathedral and the museum next to it. The gates, the bastions and the lanes are all free.

A tea garden on the bastion wall in Bastion Street, with a terrace that looks across the island toward Valletta on a clear day. It's known for its homemade cakes, the chocolate cake above all, and it's the best-placed coffee stop in Mdina.

Go in the mid-afternoon, between lunch and tour-bus time, and take a table at the edge of the terrace. If the day is windy, sit inside.

Take bus 52 or 56 from Rabat (the same lines run all the way from Valletta) to Dingli, about 2 km from Rabat on a high plateau, and you reach the edge of the island. The cliffs fall away to the open sea, with the small uninhabited rock of Filfla offshore, and the village lies near the highest point of Malta.

Sunset in Valletta runs about 17:00 in early November and 16:50 by December (calculated for CET), so be at the cliffs by 16:15. The small chapel of St Mary Magdalene is one of the points of interest, and Buskett Gardens are nearby. Buses 52 and 56 leave Valletta every 30 minutes into the evening on the scheduled timetable, but check the last bus back in the Tallinja app before you settle in, and keep a taxi or Bolt as the fallback. Bring a layer, since the plateau is exposed.

Comino is a 3.5 square kilometer island with two permanent residents, a bird sanctuary and a nature reserve, named after the cumin seed. The Blue Lagoon is the water between it and the islet of Cominotto, and it is shallow, white-sand and pale turquoise, as good as its photos. In August it's also so crowded the government introduced a booking system: since May 2025 all arrivals by boat must book a slot online at blcomino.com, there is a limit of 4,000 visitors at any one time, and there are three daily time slots. The booking is free, a wristband is given on arrival, and visiting without a booking can bring a fine. Part of the lagoon was set aside as a swimmers' zone in April 2026.

November is a different place. The water is still about 20-22°C, and the beach is quiet, but whether the pass is enforced in winter, and the boat times, need checking the evening before. Comino Ferries run from Marfa and Ċirkewwa (about 20 minutes, every 30 minutes from 8:30am, around 15 EUR return), and the operator's timetable lists hourly boats from the lagoon on to Gozo, so you can end the swim and carry on to Gozo without going back to Malta. Give the lagoon an hour, swim only on calm days, and keep the rest of the day for Gozo.

Gozo's capital Victoria (locals call it Rabat, like the town on Malta) is linked to the harbor at Mġarr by bus 323 (the Vapur line, about hourly). Lunch here should be ftira Għawdxija. On Gozo it's served flat and open like a pizza, with thinly sliced potato on the crust, or folded over like a calzone, often with ġbejniet, the small round sheep's-milk cheeselets the island is known for, plus tomatoes, olives and anchovies.

It's a long way from the ring-shaped ftira bread Valletta serves in sandwiches, and a good example of why Gozitans insist theirs is different. Eat in the old streets below the Cittadella, then walk up.

The fortified Cittadella above Victoria has been occupied since the Bronze Age. In the Middle Ages it was the refuge where the whole island's population was supposed to be inside by nightfall. In 1551 it failed: an Ottoman force sacked the Cittadella and took the island's population off in ships to be sold into slavery. The southern walls you walk on were rebuilt as a gunpowder fortress between 1599 and 1622.

Walk the ramparts, which are free, for views over Gozo's hills. The cathedral by Lorenzo Gafà (inaugurated in 1711) has no dome: there's a painted illusion of one on the flat ceiling. Among the museums, the Gran Castello Historic House is closed on Mondays, and the archaeology museum is closed while a new Gozo Museum is prepared.

Bus 311 leaves Victoria about hourly at twenty past the hour and ends at Dwejra on the west coast. The famous Azure Window, a 28-meter limestone arch, is gone: it collapsed in a storm on 8 March 2017, and divers now explore the rubble. What remains is still dramatic: the Inland Sea, a lagoon linked to the open Mediterranean through a narrow natural tunnel, and Fungus Rock, a stack of rock where the Knights collected a smelly parasitic plant they thought cured wounds.

Small boats take you through the tunnel to the open sea and around Fungus Rock, about 20-30 minutes, but only when the swell allows. The light is best in the late afternoon, and sunset is around 16:55 in mid-November. Check the last bus back to Victoria before you stay.

Bus 81 or 85 from the Valletta terminal takes about 30 minutes, and on Sundays there is also the TD10 (3 EUR; see Malta Public Transport). Marsaxlokk is a fishing village in a deep bay, where in 1565 the Ottoman fleet anchored before attacking Fort St Elmo. Most of Malta's fishing fleet is based around it, and the traditional boats you see, the luzzu, carry an eye on the bow. The eye is said to ward off bad luck at sea. Tradition calls it the Eye of Osiris and ties it to the Phoenicians, but that origin is a tradition, not settled history.

The Sunday market runs along the seafront from early morning to around noon or 1pm. Before 9am you can still see fishermen selling off the boats, the fish stalls carry swordfish, tuna, sea bream and in autumn lampuki, and the rest of the seafront turns into a tourist market, as it does on other days of the week. Come early.

The waterfront restaurants sit right on the quay with the boats in front of you. Order what's in the market: grilled fish, lampuki in season, or aljotta, the Maltese fish soup. Lampuki, the dorado that passes Malta in autumn, is landed from mid-August into December, so in November it should be on the menu.

Don't expect a quiet spot. The pleasure is the view and the freshness. Ask the price of fish by weight before ordering, as it varies.

The Blue Grotto is a set of sea caves on Malta's south coast, near the small fishing harbor of Wied iż-Żurrieq. A taxi from Marsaxlokk takes you roughly 10 km across the south of the island. Sunlight on the water inside the caverns creates the blue reflections the place is named for. From the quay, small boats take you into the caves.

The boats run only if the sea allows, and in winter the last one goes around 3:30pm (confirm at the booth), so be there by 2pm. Without a taxi, bus 74 from Valletta stops at the Żurrieq Grotto stop near the harbor and at Ħaġar Qim, about 1.5 km away, so it links the next stop too. Bring cash.

Ħaġar Qim, "worshipping stones", is a temple complex built between 3600 and 3200 BC, more than a thousand years before the Egyptian pyramids. The builders used soft limestone, which flakes and weathers, so a protective tent has covered the site since 2009. Mnajdra, a second temple complex, is part of the same archaeological park.

UNESCO listed these in 1992 together with other Maltese temple sites. They're one of the best arguments that this tiny island was a center of something long before anyone built a fortress here.

Come back by bus 74 and spend the last evening on the grid. Pick a traditional Maltese restaurant and order the dishes you haven't had yet: kapunata, the Maltese ratatouille, bigilla, a garlicky broad bean dip with bread, and lampuki pie if it's on, with a glass of local wine.

After dinner, walk the length of Republic Street once more, from the City Gate to the Palace, when the day crowds are gone. It's the best way to end the trip.