Dingli Cliffs

Overview

Dingli Cliffs are the line of sea cliffs along the south-west coast of Malta, below the village of Ħad-Dingli, and they are the island’s best known piece of open landscape: no gate, no ticket, no opening hours, just a road along the top and a chapel standing on the edge of it. The village behind them sits on a plateau about 230 m above sea level, roughly 13 km from Valletta and 2 km from Rabat.

Two heights get confused here, so it is worth separating them. Malta’s highest ground is Ta’ Dmejrek, 253 m above sea level, and it stands on this same cliff line about 1.2 km south-east of the chapel, inside the limits of Siġġiewi rather than Dingli. The clifftop where visitors actually stand, at the chapel, is around 240 m. Neither figure is the height of a single vertical drop. The cliffs are tiered: Lower Coralline Limestone at the waterline, then Globigerina Limestone and a Blue Clay slope that holds enough soil for terraced fields, then a thin Greensand band, then the Upper Coralline plateau you walk on.

The view is south and west over open water. On a clear day the flat-topped islet of Filfla sits offshore, about 7.5 km from the chapel, ringed by 60 m cliffs of its own and closed to visitors except by permit for scientific or educational work. Inland, the white sphere of the aviation radar dominates the skyline, and behind it the ground drops into the wooded valley of Buskett.

Most people give it an hour. It rewards more, because the interesting things are spread over about 2 km of plateau: the chapel, the cliff road, the cart ruts at Misraħ Għar il-Kbir and the cave complex beside them, and Buskett below. All of it is free and all of it is in the open air, which makes this the obvious counterweight to a morning spent paying into museums in Mdina and the rest of Central and Northern Malta.

History

The chapel on the edge

The Chapel of St Mary Magdalene, locally il-kappella tal-irdum, the chapel of the cliffs, is the building in every photograph of this coast. A chapel on the site is first recorded in 1446. It was derelict by 1575 and later collapsed; the present one was rebuilt in the 17th century and reopened by Bishop Miguel Juan Balaguer Camarasa on 15 April 1646, a date recorded in the Latin inscription above the door. It was a farmers’ chapel, far from the village, and fishermen offshore used it as a landmark; mass is still said there on 22 July, the saint’s day.

The cart ruts, and what nobody knows about them

About a kilometre inland, at Misraħ Għar il-Kbir, bare limestone is scored with dozens of pairs of parallel grooves that cross and merge. The archaeologist David Trump nicknamed the place Clapham Junction after the London railway station, and the name stuck. The ruts here are the densest concentration in the Maltese islands, holding a near constant gauge of about 1.4 m and cut between 10 and 60 cm deep.

Be careful with what you read about them, because their age and purpose are unresolved. Published estimates run from the Neolithic to medieval times, and researchers have suggested that different ruts were cut in different periods, perhaps for different jobs. The best-supported mechanism is unglamorous: a 2008 study by geomorphologists at the University of Portsmouth argued that Maltese limestone loses around 80 per cent of its strength when wet, so wooden-wheeled carts wore tracks into soil first and then into softened bedrock, after which following carts used the same grooves. Everything beyond that, irrigation channels, ceremonial routes and the story about landing strips for spacecraft, is speculation, and the local interpretation centre lists the last of those as a joke rather than a theory.

Beside the ruts is Għar il-Kbir, “the big cave”, eight rock-cut chambers on two levels, inhabited into the 1830s and home to more than a hundred people in the mid-16th century before the British authorities cleared it.

The golf ball

The radar is not a modern intrusion; it is the older military use of this ground made visible. The first radar station in the Maltese islands went up at Dingli Cliffs on 27 March 1939, and by mid-1941 it was part of a triangulation network with Fort Tas-Silġ and Fort Madliena, feeding plots to the Lascaris War Rooms in Valletta so that RAF fighters could intercept incoming formations. Malta took over its own air traffic systems in 1979; the present dome, which everyone calls the golf ball, dates from the 1980s and was in service by 1986, run today by Malta Air Traffic Services. Its fence is not decorative, and there is a warning notice for anyone with a pacemaker.

Visiting

Getting there

The useful bus is route 201, which runs between Rabat and the airport and is the only service that drives the cliff road itself, calling at Viżitaturi, Maddalena and Cliffs. The operator’s weekday timetable in the Rabat to airport direction shows 13 departures, roughly hourly from 08:30 to 20:30, with the Maddalena stop about ten minutes after Rabat. From Valletta, route 52 reaches Ħad-Dingli village in about 50 minutes and runs every half hour from early morning to late evening, and route 56 takes a slower loop through Buskett; both stop in the village, roughly a kilometre from the chapel, not on the cliff road.

Driving is on the left. There is free roadside parking beside the chapel and more by the interpretation centre; neither is large, and both fill on Sunday afternoons and around sunset.

The walk along the top

Triq Panoramika, the road along the clifftop, is the whole point. Walking it from the chapel south past the radar and back takes under an hour, and the view is west over open sea, which is why the road fills in the last hour of daylight. The plateau either side is garigue: low aromatic shrubs, Mediterranean thyme, kidney vetch and orchids over bare rock, with the boulder screes below sheltering endemic plants including the Maltese rock-centaury, Malta’s national plant. Blue rock thrush, the national bird, nests in cavities in the cliff face.

The Cliffs Interpretation Centre, a cafeteria and information point on Triq Panoramika, is the only staffed building on this stretch. Its contact page lists summer hours of 15:00 to 21:00 Monday to Friday and 08:00 to 21:00 at weekends, and winter hours of 09:30 to 17:30 daily; it also runs guided walks locally for pre-arranged groups. Those hours are undated on the page and the site’s news list carries a refurbishment shutdown notice, so phone before relying on it.

Buskett and the cart ruts

Buskett lies about 1.6 km north-east of the chapel, in the valley of Wied il-Luq. BirdLife Malta describes it as Malta’s only semi-natural woodland, a Special Area of Conservation within Natura 2000 and an Important Bird Area, with holm oak, Aleppo pine, olive and white poplar. The Order of St John planted it as a hunting ground, and Verdala Palace, built in the 1580s as a grand master’s summer residence and now a presidential one, stands on its edge, closed to the public except on rare occasions. It is also where Malta holds L-Imnarja, the feast of St Peter and St Paul on 29 June and a public holiday, with an agricultural show, folk singing and rabbit stew, the crowds arriving the evening before.

The cart ruts sit on open garigue roughly a kilometre east of the chapel, between the cliff road and Buskett. There is no gate, no ticket and very little signage; you park on the verge and walk in. Take a phone map, because the site does not announce itself.

Tips

• Go late. The cliffs face west and south. The last hour before sunset is the reason to come, and it is also when the road is busiest and the parking gone. Arrive an hour early and walk while the light drops.
• Bring water and a hat. There is no shade on the plateau and no drinking water outside the interpretation centre. The exposure that makes the view also makes the wind: this coast is open to everything the sea throws at it, which is why the cliff plants here are low and spiny.
• Binoculars earn their weight. Filfla is far enough out, about 7.5 km, that it is a silhouette to the naked eye. In autumn, Buskett below is one of the better places in Malta to watch raptors on migration, honey buzzards and marsh harriers among them, roosting in flocks.
• Check the last bus. Route 201 ends its Rabat to airport run in the evening, and the last departures are earlier than you might expect for a sunset spot. Wikipedia notes that night buses have not run into Dingli village, leaving passengers to stop at Rabat, though that observation dates from 2017 and should be checked against the operator.
• The chapel is small and often locked. Its interest is the setting and the façade, not a rich interior; the altarpiece inside is a modern work.
• Combine it southwards. Route 201 continues past the cliffs to Siġġiewi and then along the south coast, which puts Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra and the Blue Grotto on the same bus as the cliffs.

If you stay for that, bring a torch and drive rather than rely on buses, and remember that everything said above about the unfenced edge applies twice over after dark.