MALTA – 17 October 2026
Christine had stayed at Malta a few years ago and loved the place. We were booked into one of the “included” trips, but after the last three, we decided that Malta deserved more than a 3 hour walk/drive around town. So, Christine scoped out the options and booked us into a private tour for just the four of us. Turned out to be the best decision we’d made over the last five weeks.
We were picked up at the port right on 10.00am, by Chamasin – a lovely young Maltese man in a roomy 6-seater car.
As we sailed into port early in the morning, our first glimpse of Malta, the fortified city.
Our first stop with the tour was the San Anton Garden, part of the San Anton Palace (Il-Palazz Sant’Anton), in Attard, that currently serves as the official residence of the president of Malta. It was originally built in the early 17th century as a country villa for Antoine de Paule, a knight of the Order of St. John. I really enjoyed this stop at the Garden mainly because there were absolutely no tourists, it felt like an authentic step into “real” Malta, I even chatted with some locals who were there to enjoy the peace and quiet.
We were first drawn to this lovely fountain.
And as we wandered through the park we found a number of Australian plants, notably this very old Morton Bay Fig (with a sign on it noting it’s from Australia) and another tree that I hadn’t heard of a Cow Itch Tree.
We came across three fountains most of which had ducks and turtles in them.
Lovely arbor. There’s a lot of work going on to resurrect much of the park to its former glory and a visit to it will be well worth the time in a year or two.
Our next stop was the Sanctuary Basilica of the Assumption of Our Lady (Santwarju Bażilika ta’ Santa Marija), commonly known as the Rotunda of Mosta, the Mosta Dome or another bloody church. I have to say though that this visit probably outperformed all other church visits, we spent an hour here.
The facade isn’t all that much to write home about, nice, but it doesn’t do the inside of the church justice.
Inside (and focus is on the lights lol). There were tourists here, but not that many, probably 50 or so, so I didn’t feel overwhelmed.
And how good is this light?
The view from the back, what you would see if you went to church.
The dome itself. There was a crane there so that a work person could do touch ups on some of the paint (or maybe he was just cleaning dust). One of the highlights of the dome is that during WW2, a bomb hit the dome, went through one of the square features and then got stuck there. Luckily it didn’t go off but the square that it entered is a different colour to all the others.
We took a quick tour through the crypts (to see where all the head-honchos had been buried) and then took the lift up to the top of the dome.
Once we went around it for about 20m it opened out into something more impressive.
Then we came to a door that enabled us to enter the church (and the balcony above) and view it from above, now, this is really impressive! (note the small number of tourists LOL)
Our exit from the dome was down the most beautiful spiral staircase, all of it including the “railing” cast in stone. The steps in some places were worn down showing the hundreds of years that the clergy had ascended/descended them.
We exited the stairs through another door and got this lovely view of the front of the Basilica.
All up, we spent about an hour in the Basilica and the entry fee was ∈6 – definitely worth it – and hardly any tourists!
On the way to a glass-blowing factory I noticed the castle on the hill – I hope we’re going there! Also, note the Prickly Pear (cactus) it’s pretty much growing everywhere. In Australia it’s a pest and in fact farmers are supposed to keep their land clear of it, but here they’re making Prickly Pear juice out of it! Why aren’t we producing Prickly Pear Juice???
In the glass factory, this young man was able to make each of these ornaments in less than 15 minutes. I ended up spending quite a bit of money on some of the glass – went in there with the intention not to buy anything LOL.
I was impressed by the glass balls on the tree, not that I’d want something like that, but more that it hadn’t been trashed by hoodlums – or maybe it’s that Malta doesn’t have low-life kids LOL.
Next on the tour was Mdina (L-Imdina), also known by its Italian names Città Vecchia (“Old City”) and Città Notabile (“Notable City”). This is a fortified city (it even has evidence of a moat around it) in the Western Region of Malta and was the island’s capital up to the medieval period. The city has not spread beyond its ancient walls, and had a population of 242 as of July 2024.
Armed with a map and a lot of area to cover we were on our way. We basically went up the middle and then around to the left-hand size, we had a little less than 2 hours to explore.
The entrance – it looked better than this photo but I had to cut all the tourists out (probably about 50 at the gate but that was 50 too many for the photo).
As it has a population, vehicles owned by the residents can drive around but other than that, to get from a to be you can walk or they have some horse drawn carriages (mainly for the tourists lol).
These window grids have to be from the middle ages!
I have fallen in love with this kind of architecture (which obviously is all over Europe), but I can’t get enough of it.
Another church – unfortunately for Rhonda, fortunately for me, the church was closed for weddings for the rest of the afternoon. Nice looking from the outside though.
Loved the colours that this owner used, a little different to green or blue.
The streets were pretty much this wide.
And some of the buildings had a “rounded” facade.
On the way back to the car, we had some time to spare so followed this alley to “the secret garden” cafe.
The cafe was below ground – I’m assuming it was storage at some time, then we went upstairs to find that they’d added to the building and there was a large conference/function room and a lovely garden out the back. We stopped for a glass of wine.
Coming down the stairs, Ray and I took a good look at the doors and our guess is that they are the original doors (solid-as) and the hinges looked like they were from the middle ages lol.
We got back to the guide (a little over our schedule arrival time) and then headed off to the Chapel of St Mary Magdalene, a Roman Catholic chapel in the Dingli. The building overlooks the Dingli Cliffs, and is therefore commonly known as the cliff chapel. The chapel was built in 1646 on the site of another one, which had existed since at least the 15th century.
But not before this building captured my eye.
And here’s the church, probably 10 tourists admiring the scenery. You cannot get into the chapel, but just seeing it from the outside was enough for me.
The view from the Chapel – obviously in the past, this had been an agricultural area, terraces had been built with limestone rocks and there were a few buildings, but not sure that they are now inhabited except for one lot that had a good olive plantation. The cliffs in the distance look interesting.
By now it’s around 3pm and we’ve been on the road since 10am so I’m thinking our tour may be close to being over, but no, we’re headed over the some temples that are at least 5,000 years old – or as Christine said, older than the Egyptian Pyramids! Ħaġar Qim (translated as ‘Worshipping Stones‘) is a megalithic temple complex found on Malta, dating from the Ġgantija phase (3600–3200 BC). They are among the most ancient religious sites on the planet.
On the way I spied this from the car, don’t know but it’s either a very old road or some sort of aquaduct.
We were able to watch a video before coming out to the sites. The video was fantastic, it showed how they’ve assumed the temple was built and then once it was abandoned how over the years it is assumed that most of the temple had been buried under sand, only a few really tall rocks could be seen and the tops of some of the “rooms”. And here we are … the entrance to the main temple after excavations. This is where we started. It’s very well set up, if you use a QR code you can get an audio explaining different stations in the temple.
Another “room”. The whole of this site is covered so that no more erosion can take place.
This is a circular chamber.
This piece of limestone (it’s a replica) has spiral decorations on it with a lot of drilled holes.
This is a replica of some sort of either seat or altar, it has carvings all over it.
A “door” from one “room” to another, there are 2 of these in the main temple.
Another circular chamber.
Strange holes drilled into some parts of the walls, no-one knows why.
This is the sort of terrain where the temple was built. There is a very good view of the ocean plus an island off shore. The land would not have been good for agriculture because it’s all limestone.
The others had finished, but there was another temple further down and I figured I’m only going to be here once so I’m checking it out. The path down is pretty dodgy but if you look to the right you can see that they are making a good route down to the site.
It was a good 200m to the site but IMO it was better than the major site.
Note the limestone slabs for the floor. All the sites must have been very special to get this sort of treatment when they didn’t have the sort of tools that we have.
Circular site with possibly a door through to another section. Note, all these “rooms” did have ceilings, but I’m guessing that when they fell in, they didn’t fall in one piece and a pile of rubble was left behind.
Another circular “room” in the background.
And what looks like the main room. If you look closely in the distance, you can see what look like “lines” I believe that these particular rocks had fractured when they fell and they’ve been stuck together with cement. I there might be some controversy about putting the stones together with cement as it was done a long time ago.
I’d spent more than my allotted time here so had to hurry back to the guide as they’d been waiting around for a long time – bit of a slog getting back to the car but it was well worth it.
I thought it was all over but then he told us we were going to the cove. Not sure what it’s called, but it was pretty specky.
If there aren’t caves in there, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Really wish I was staying here a day longer to check that cove out.
And the other side of the cove, am sure there’s cave somewhere down there, that whole spur is limestone.
We then went to a fish market on the coast which had a really nice fishing village feel to it and then a drive by of the three cities at the port, Vittoriosa, Senglea and Cospicua. It’s a pity we didn’t have another day as I would have enjoyed exploring some of these old cities.
Well done Christine for finding this tour for us, really made the trip.