Malta

8 April 2024 – Valletta, Malta

We are currently in Malta, a place which we haven’t yet visited because it isn’t directly on the route to and from Gibraltar. The small island country is about eighty miles south of Sicily and has a long history of being colonized since the ancient times by other powers including Rome, Carthage, France, and England, before gaining independence in 1964.

After filling up on fuel and water from the marina, we moored in the long bay between the island of Valetta with its beautiful old buildings and the modern city of Sliema and its skyscrapers. There are many laid moorings so we took one each for the bow and stern to prevent us from swinging into other boats in the narrow harbour. It was a bit difficult to figure out the stern mooring because there were so many floating around and we couldn’t figure out which float was attache to which lines. There was a collection of jugs bobbing around near our bow which seemed to be attached to the stern mooring or were maybe tangled in something else that prevented us from lifting them out of the water to tie on to. We eventually towed them forwards with the dinghy and tied them temporarily to our bow mooring to stop them from bumping against Festina Lente’s hull all night. The good thing about this location is that the modern town is a short dinghy ride away, while Valletta can be visited by taking a ten minute ferry ride from the nearby terminal.

I’m really glad we decided to come here this time because the old town of Valletta is absolutely stunning. The capital of Malta is a fortified city which is quite impressive to sail past, with its thick stone walls and old buildings straight out of a picture from the Middle Ages.

The day we took the ferry into Valletta, we accidentally ended up in the middle of a ceremony to swear in the eleventh president of Malta, Myriam Spiteri Debono. We were walking through a large square when we saw a crowd of people in the centre around a fenced off area, as well as a screen on the side of the building broadcasting the news. A marching band was in the square and after waiting for a bit, what I assume was the president’s car drove by and she entered one of the nearby buildings. It was a bit unclear what was going on and if that was the president herself, but there was definitely a lot of fanfare.

Once we extricated ourselves from the crowds, we went inside St. John’s Co-Cathedral, a Baroque Roman Catholic cathedral built by the Knights of St. John between 1572 and 1577. It seems as though everything was covered in gold inside, even the walls, and each chapel houses multiple paintings and statues. It also houses two of Caravaggio’s works, including The Beheading of St John the Baptist from 1608.

St. John’s Co-Cathedral – Valletta, Malta

Caravaggio’s *The Beheading of St John the Baptist –* Valletta, Malta

On Wednesday, we rented a car and drove to the prehistoric temples of Tarxien, Ħaġar Qim, and Mnajdra. They are megalithic temples from the Stone Age, built over five thousand years ago out of massive blocks of stone. Due to their extreme age (they are older than both Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Egypt), little is known about the society that built them, though Tarxien is thought to have been a place of animal sacrifice and many stone carvings of plump figures were found in the sites, maybe related to fertility. All three temples are covered to protect the sandstone from eroding, although Ħaġar Qim in particular has suffered weathering damage since it was excavated in the early 1839.

Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra are especially grand and imposing, and we were able to walk around inside the rooms. It is particularly impressive to think that these giant rocks were transported and stood up in the Stone Age without much of the technology we would use today; the huge slabs, the biggest of which was twenty tonnes, were probably rolled there on little round rocks.

We then drove to the fortified town of Mdina, which was also stunning. It is similar to Valletta, as it was the previous capital of Malta, and preserves the feeling that it is still in the Middle Ages because no cars are allowed inside.

For the past few days, we have mainly just been hanging out between Valletta and Sliema. The weather is some of the best we have had all trip, hot but not too hot and sunny all the time. I went to a lot of bookstores (they sell books in English here because the island was colonized by the British until 1964 and English and Maltese are the two official languages); my favourite was a little used bookshop where the entire second floor was filled with two and three euro books arranged in no discernible order.

My mom and I also found a great Asian grocery store, and my dad and Jonas went to the marine store at least once a day. We are leaving here today to head for Blue Lagoon but will probably return in a few days when the weather becomes less favourable.

Passage to Sardinia

Syracusa

Festina Lente