Gozo and Comino

Overview

Gozo is the second island of the Maltese archipelago, a 25 minute ferry ride north of Malta proper, with Comino, a nearly uninhabited islet, sitting in the channel between the two. Maltese speakers call it Għawdex, and its 39,287 residents are Gozitans, Għawdxin. The island covers 67 square kilometres, and everything about it runs at a lower intensity than the main island: fewer cars, fewer cranes, more terraced fields and dry stone walls between flat-topped hills.

That slower pace is the point. Gozo is rural in character and visibly less developed than Malta, and most of its settlements are villages of a few thousand people arranged around outsized parish churches. At the centre sits Victoria, the only real town, with the fortified Cittadella rising above it. Within a 20 minute drive of Victoria you have the Neolithic Ġgantija temples, the raw coastal geology of Dwejra, the red sand of Ramla Bay, and some of the Mediterranean’s best known shore diving.

Comino is a different proposition. Its permanent population is two, the island is a bird sanctuary and Natura 2000 protected area, and almost everyone comes for a single reason: the Blue Lagoon, a shallow channel of pale turquoise water between Comino and the islet of Cominotto. The lagoon’s popularity brought serious overcrowding, and since 2025 summer access has been managed through a free booking system with capped time slots, covered in detail below. Gozo rewards a stay of several nights; Comino is a half-day trip you now plan in advance.

History & character

People were farming and building on Gozo long before the pyramids went up. The two temples of Ġgantija, on the Xagħra plateau, date from around 3600 BC, which makes them older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids; together with Malta’s other megalithic temples they are described by Wikipedia as amongst the world’s oldest free-standing structures. Gozitan folklore credits the construction to Sansuna, a giantess who lived on broad beans and honey and built the temples while carrying her infant.

Classical tradition ties the island to myth as well. Some ancient Greek writers identified Gozo with Ogygia, the island where the nymph Calypso kept Odysseus for seven years, a claim other Mediterranean islands also make; the cave above Ramla Bay that bears her name trades on the association.

The defining trauma of Gozitan history came in July 1551, when an Ottoman force ravaged the island and carried off most of its roughly 5,000 inhabitants into slavery. The Knights of St John repopulated Gozo between 1565 and 1580 with settlers from mainland Malta, and the watchtowers and fortifications you see today, including Comino’s Santa Marija Tower of 1618, belong to the centuries of coastal insecurity that followed.

The character that survives all this is distinct from Malta’s. Gozo kept its agriculture and its village rhythms while the main island urbanised: the settlements remain villages built around parish churches on squares of limestone houses, and trades like baking and salt harvesting are still ways of earning a living here rather than heritage performances.

See & do

The Cittadella and Victoria

Start in Victoria, because every bus route does. The town’s covered market squares and cafe life are worth a morning on their own, and the Cittadella, the walled citadel above the rooftops, holds the Cathedral of the Assumption and wide views over the whole island. Both have their own pages in this guide.

Ġgantija

The Ġgantija Archaeological Park in Xagħra is Gozo’s essential sight: two Neolithic temples on a plateau edge, part of the Megalithic Temples of Malta World Heritage listing, entered through a modern interpretation centre. Heritage Malta runs the site; the adult ticket is €10 and includes the nearby Ta’ Kola Windmill.

Dwejra, without the Azure Window

Dwejra, on the west coast, was long sold on the Azure Window, a huge limestone arch that collapsed into the sea during a storm on 8 March 2017. It no longer exists, and any brochure or map that shows it is out of date. What remains still justifies the trip: the Inland Sea, a lagoon connected to open water through a tunnel in the cliff, Fungus Rock guarding Dwejra Bay, a 17th century watchtower, and underwater scenery that divers rate more highly than ever, since the fallen arch now forms a boulder field described as a divers’ paradise. The full story is on the Dwejra page.

Ramla Bay and Calypso’s Cave

Ramla Bay, Ramla il-Ħamra in Maltese, is the island’s best beach: a wide arc of unusual red-gold sand backed by a rare dune habitat, with Roman remains under the sand and only a few cafes behind it. Above the western side is Calypso’s Cave, the supposed home of Homer’s nymph. The cave itself is small and has spent long periods closed over collapse fears; the clifftop viewpoint beside it, with the whole red bay below, is the real reason to walk up.

Diving

Gozo is a shore diving destination of European rank. The Blue Hole at Dwejra, a natural rock tube with an archway exit at depth, is the signature dive, and Visit Gozo lists 17 dive centres on the island along with sites such as the Inland Sea tunnel, the Cathedral Cave at Għasri, the Double Arch reef and four scuttled wrecks including the P31, shallow enough for beginners. The sea never drops below 14C, so the season effectively runs all year.

Ta’ Pinu and the salt pans

The basilica of Ta’ Pinu, outside Għarb, is Malta’s national Marian shrine, built between 1920 and 1932 on the spot where a villager reported hearing the Virgin’s voice in 1883; three popes have honoured it. On the north coast past Marsalforn, chequerboards of 350 year old salt pans stretch about three kilometres along the shore, and families still harvest sea salt there each summer.

Comino and the Blue Lagoon

The Blue Lagoon needs no selling and suffers for it; see its page for the booking system, and consider walking inland to the 1618 Santa Marija Tower once you are on Comino, since almost nobody leaves the water’s edge.

Towns & cities

Victoria is the capital and the only town of any size, with around 7,500 residents, the island’s markets, its bus terminus and two rival opera houses, the Aurora and the Astra. Everything else is a village, almost always built around a parish church on a square of limestone houses.

Xagħra spreads across the plateau that holds Ġgantija and looks down on Ramla Bay; it is one of Gozo’s largest and liveliest villages. Nadur, on its own plateau to the east, is the island’s second town, known for its bakeries and its orchards of plums, peaches, apples and citrus, with the small coves of San Blas and Daħlet Qorrot below it.

The two seaside resorts are modest by Maltese standards. Marsalforn, on the north coast between Xagħra and Żebbuġ, is the larger, with hotels, guest houses and a strip of waterfront restaurants around its bay. Xlendi, in the southwest, is the other seaside village, its restaurants and guesthouses gathered tightly around a small bay walled in by cliffs.

Inland, Għarb and San Lawrenz in the west keep some of the island’s prettiest village cores and serve as bases for Ta’ Pinu and Dwejra. Xewkija is unmissable from any high point thanks to its Rotunda, a vast domed church out of all proportion to the village. Ta’ Sannat, in the south, sits by the Ta’ Ċenċ cliffs and their prehistoric cart ruts and dolmens. Għajnsielem runs downhill to Mġarr harbour, where the ferries dock, and Qala, Żebbuġ, Munxar, Kerċem and tiny Fontana round out the village map.

Food & drink

Gozo’s food identity is agricultural. The emblem is the ġbejna, a small round cheeselet of sheep’s milk, salt and rennet, eaten fresh and milky, sun-dried to a nutty hardness, or cured and rolled in crushed pepper; the dried version is so associated with the island that one of its Maltese names is simply t’Għawdex, “of Gozo”. You will meet ġbejniet in widow’s soup, on ftira, deep fried as a starter and on every mixed platter.

The second emblem is the Gozitan ftira. Maltese ftira bread carries a UNESCO intangible heritage listing, and Gozo’s version is its own dish: served more like a pizza than a sandwich, open with thin slices of potato over the crust or folded like a calzone, usually with tomato, capers, olives, anchovy or local cheese. Village bakeries, with Nadur’s especially well known, sell it by the slice or made to order.

Beyond those two, look for Nadur’s orchard fruit in season, sea salt harvested at the Xwejni pans and sold in shops and sometimes straight from the roadside, and fish landed at Mġarr, cooked along the waterfronts of Xlendi and Marsalforn. Restaurant culture is village-scale, at its densest along the waterfronts of Marsalforn and Xlendi and around the harbour at Mġarr.

Nature

For a 67 square kilometre island, Gozo has an unusual amount of protected and simply wild coastline. The south coast climaxes at Ta’ Ċenċ near Sannat, whose very high cliffs carry a garrigue plateau marked with ancient cart ruts and dolmens. On the north coast, the inlet of Wied il-Għasri hides the Cathedral Cave dive site at its seaward end, and the coast at Xwejni Bay mixes a pebble beach, a double rock arch and the working salt pans.

Ramla Bay’s dunes are an ecologically important and rare habitat in Malta, one reason the beach has stayed undeveloped. At Dwejra the geology does the work: the Inland Sea sinkhole, Fungus Rock, and the submerged remains of the Azure Window. Since the 2017 collapse, the nearest surviving natural arch is the Wied il-Mielaħ Window, 3.7 kilometres northeast of where the Azure Window stood, reached down a quiet valley from Għarb.

Comino is a nature reserve and bird sanctuary as well as a beach stop: a Natura 2000 marine protected area whose cliffs support fifty to eighty breeding pairs of yelkouan shearwaters.

Walkers get the best of the island between autumn and spring, when the plateaus turn green and the clifftop paths between Xlendi, Ta’ Ċenċ, Dwejra and the salt pan coast are cool enough to enjoy.

Climate

Gozo has a textbook Mediterranean pattern: hot, effectively rainless summers and mild, wet winters. ERA5 reanalysis normals for 1991 to 2020, taken at a point near Victoria, look like this:

Month	High C	Low C	Rain mm
Jan	14.2	12.8	57
Feb	13.7	12.2	51
Mar	14.4	13.0	32
Apr	15.8	14.5	15
May	18.6	17.3	6
Jun	22.2	20.8	3
Jul	25.0	23.6	0
Aug	26.1	24.8	3
Sep	24.5	23.2	32
Oct	22.2	20.7	55
Nov	19.1	17.4	72
Dec	16.0	14.3	74

Two caveats. First, these figures come from a reanalysis grid cell that is mostly open sea, which narrows the day-night spread; summer afternoons inland on the plateaus feel hotter than the table suggests, and winter nights in the villages feel cooler. Second, the rain arrives in bursts: the wet window runs November to February, July is essentially dry, and a whole month’s total can fall in one storm.

The sea lags the air. It stays warm enough for comfortable swimming well into autumn and never drops below 14C in winter, which keeps the dive centres open through the year.

When to go

May, June, September and October are the sweet spots: reliably warm, dry, and light on crowds compared with high summer. The sea is at its best from June into November, and divers work the island in every month because the water never falls below 14C.

July and August are hot, busy and thick with village festas for the patron saints, Nadur’s feast of St Peter and St Paul on 29 June among the first of the run. High summer is also the season when the Blue Lagoon’s booking system really bites: if a Comino swim is the centrepiece of your trip, reserve your slot before you travel.

Winter is quiet, green and occasionally wild, with most rain falling between November and February; many seaside businesses in Marsalforn and Xlendi wind down. The exception is carnival week before Ash Wednesday, when Nadur stages Malta’s strangest party, a darker and more risqué affair of grotesque masks, cross-dressing and ghost costumes that fills the village at night.

Getting there

There is no airport on Gozo, and the helicopter link from Malta ended in 2006, so everyone arrives by sea.

The Gozo Channel ferry

The workhorse route is Gozo Channel’s car ferry between Ċirkewwa, at Malta’s northwestern tip near Mellieħa, and Mġarr harbour on Gozo. The crossing takes about 25 minutes and runs every 45 minutes during the summer and almost as often in winter. Ticketing works in one direction only: you board at Ċirkewwa without a ticket and pay when leaving Gozo, where tickets are sold online or at the Mġarr booths and validated before the return crossing. The standard passenger fare is €4.05, children aged 3 to 12 pay €1.15, and there are separate tariffs for cars, motorcycles and bicycles.

The Valletta fast ferry

Gozo Highspeed runs a passenger-only fast ferry between Lascaris Wharf in Valletta’s Grand Harbour and Mġarr, taking about 45 minutes. Unlike the channel ferry, it charges per leg: the standard one way fare is €7.50, with €3 fares for seniors and children and reductions for Gozo residents and students. It saves you the bus ride across Malta and lands you a short walk from the capital, though sailings depend on sea conditions.

Getting to Comino

Comino has no scheduled car ferry; small boats shuttle across from both Ċirkewwa on Malta and Mġarr on Gozo, alongside the day-trip cruises that anchor off the lagoon. In summer, landing at the Blue Lagoon requires a free advance booking at bluelagooncomino.mt: the system, introduced in 2025 and kept for 2026, caps numbers at 4,000 per time slot across three daily slots and issues a QR code that is exchanged for a wristband on arrival.

Getting around

Gozo is small: nowhere is much more than a 25 minute drive from Victoria. Public buses radiate from the Victoria terminus to the villages, Mġarr harbour, Marsalforn, Xlendi and the main sights, with a cash single costing €2.50 in summer and €2.00 in winter, valid for two hours of travel; multi-day Explore cards cover the whole national network including Gozo.

The catch is frequency. Many village routes run once or twice an hour and are timed around the school and ferry day, so a bus-only itinerary needs patience, especially on Sundays. Hire cars are the practical answer for Dwejra, Ta’ Ċenċ and the salt pan coast; remember that Malta drives on the left, and that village core streets are narrow, so park at the edge and walk in. Taxis and hire cars operate across the island, and hop-on hop-off buses depart from outside the ferry terminal at Mġarr.

Distances also suit walkers. The coastal paths between Xlendi, Sannat and Dwejra turn sightseeing into a linear walk, with a bus back to Victoria from the nearest village at the end.

Practical info

Money and language. Gozo uses the euro, and Maltese and English are both official; English works everywhere, and a Maltese greeting is well received. Victoria is the island’s administrative and commercial hub, with its markets and main shops.

Where to stay. The signature Gozo lodging is the converted farmhouse: thick-walled limestone houses with shaded courtyards and beamed interiors, most now fitted with private pools, rented whole in and around the villages. Hotels cluster in Marsalforn, Xlendi and near Mġarr, and small family-run guesthouses and B&Bs fill the gaps. Book farmhouses well ahead for summer weeks.

Tickets and bookings. Heritage Malta’s site pages are the authoritative source for hours and prices at Ġgantija and its other Gozo properties, and its online shop is the only ticket channel you should use. For the Blue Lagoon in summer, book the free slot at bluelagooncomino.mt before you commit to a boat, and keep the QR code on your phone.

Timing your day. Village Gozo still closes for lunch, and many sights and shops keep morning-heavy hours. Do outdoor sights early in summer, check Heritage Malta’s opening pages the day before, and treat the last ferries of the evening with respect if you have a flight from Malta the next morning.