Blue Lagoon

Overview

The Blue Lagoon is the shallow stretch of sea between Comino (Maltese: Kemmuna) and the uninhabited islet of Cominotto (Kemmunett), and it is the single most visited swimming spot in Malta. Its Maltese name, Bejn il-Kmiemen, simply means “between the Cominos”. The colour that fills every photograph of the place is not a filter: the channel is shallow and floored with pale sand over limestone, so sunlight passes down, bounces back off a white bed and returns as the cyan you see from the boat before you have even landed. Cominotto, a quarter of a square kilometre of rock with nobody living on it, closes the far side and keeps the water inside calm.

Everything else about a visit follows from one fact: this is a very small place with a very large audience. Comino is 3.5 square kilometres, has two permanent residents, and is a bird sanctuary and a Natura 2000 protected area. There are no cars, no village, no road in. You arrive by boat, you walk down to the water, and in high summer you share the lagoon with thousands of other people who did the same thing in the same hour.

Since 2025 access has been rationed. The Malta Tourism Authority runs a free online landing pass system, branded “Book, Protect, Enjoy”, which splits the day into three slots and caps the site at 4,000 visitors at any one time, down from peak crowds of around 12,000 recorded in the summer of 2024. Booking is free, you get a QR code, and the code is swapped for a coloured wristband at the departure point or on arrival. The same system, with the same 4,000 cap, was in force again through 2026.

None of that means you should skip it. It means you should go at the right hour of the right day, know that a booking is compulsory and free, and treat the lagoon as one stop on a day around Comino rather than as a beach to occupy from morning to dusk. Handled that way it is still one of the best swims in the Mediterranean.

History

Comino has spent most of its recorded history nearly empty. Romans farmed it, and its cliffs and deep coastal caves made it a useful base for corsairs raiding boats crossing between Malta and Gozo in the Middle Ages. The exiled Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia lived here from 1285, writing his Sefer ha-Ot on the island. Under the Knights of St John it became a game reserve for wild boar and hare, guarded so jealously that poaching carried a sentence of three years as a galley slave, and a place of exile for knights convicted of minor offences.

The Maltese had asked for a tower on Comino as early as 1416, and got nothing for two centuries. Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt finally built St Mary’s Tower (it-Torri ta’ Santa Marija) in 1618, financing it partly by selling off the island’s brushwood; at 80 metres above the sea, with four corner turrets and walls six metres thick, it was the most expensive of all the Wignacourt towers. Santa Marija Battery followed in 1715 to cover the South Comino Channel.

The lagoon’s own story is much shorter and much more contested. Through the 2010s the beach filled up with commercial deckchairs and umbrellas laid out from around 7am, and with a row of kiosks, none of which held a permit from the Malta Tourism Authority. Moviment Graffitti activists physically cleared the deckchairs in 2022 to make the point. The management plan for the Natura 2000 site had required a carrying capacity study by 2016. It was still missing in 2022, and the study the Environment and Resources Authority eventually carried out has never been published.

The booking system arrived on 1 May 2025 and had a rough start. Commercial vessel operators obtained a court injunction two days later and the platform was suspended; on 15 May a court dismissed their case, ruling that protecting Comino was “undoubtedly in the national and general interest”, and the system restarted. That first summer, the MTA claimed peak concentrations had fallen 68 per cent, with a July and August high of 3,830 people on 22 August; it published no data to support the figure, and a Newsbook investigation had already found QR codes going unscanned and time limits unenforced. In October 2025 the MTA filed a planning application, drawn up by Mizzi Studio, to move the kiosks off the shoreline, restore up to 35,000 square metres of garigue, shift boat berthing away from the swimming area and enlarge the swimming zone by a further 20 per cent.

Visiting

Book first, then book your boat. The landing pass is free and is issued through the official site at blcomino.com, which is where the address bluelagooncomino.mt now redirects and which VisitMalta links to as the official channel. As of the booking platform’s own configuration in August 2026 the three slots ran 08:00 to 13:30, 13:30 to 17:30 and 17:30 to 22:00, with up to four passes per booking and the calendar open to mid November. Press reports have quoted slightly different times at different points, including 8am to 1pm, 1.30pm to 5.30pm and 6pm to 10pm, so take the times from the booking site itself on the day you reserve rather than from any guide, this one included.

The pass covers landing, not transport. Scheduled boats run to Comino from Ċirkewwa and Marfa on the northern tip of Malta, both in Mellieħa, and from Mġarr harbour and Ħondoq ir-Rummien on Gozo. Larger excursion boats run day trips from Sliema and Buġibba in St Paul’s Bay, typically combining the lagoon with a cruise around Comino and Gozo. Since 2026 there have been eight staffed visitor information booths to help with the booking process: three in Sliema, one in Buġibba, one in Mellieħa and one each at the three departure points of Ċirkewwa, Marfa and Mġarr.

What you find when you land

Boats tie up at jetties along the Comino side. Steps and narrow walkways lead up and over to the lagoon, past the kiosk row selling cocktails, burgers and souvenirs. There are two small patches of sand and a great deal of flat rock, which is where most people end up; parts of the rock are covered with rented umbrellas and sunbeds from early in the morning.

The swimming zone was enlarged by 12 per cent before the 2025 season, extending the central roped area and adding two small inlets to the left of the jetty that are now reserved for swimmers only, having previously been open to small boats and jet skis. Stay inside the buoys. Traffic in the channel is heavy and constant.

Two other stretches of water get named on boat tours. The Crystal Lagoon sits on the south coast a few hundred metres from the Blue Lagoon, deeper, walled by cliffs and reached only by boat; the Santa Marija Caves are on the north east coast, a well known snorkelling and dive spot. Both are on the standard round-the-island itinerary from Ċirkewwa and Mġarr, and both are considerably quieter than the lagoon at midday.

Tips

Take the first slot or the last one. The lagoon was already busy by 09:30 and filling fast by 10:30 on a June 2026 weekday, and the middle of the day is when the large excursion boats from Sliema and Buġibba arrive. An evening slot running to 22:00 is a genuinely different experience, and so is May or October, when the water is still swimmable and the day-trip fleet is thinner.

Come prepared for a bare island. The ground around the lagoon is karst rock and garigue scrub, with some pine planting elsewhere on Comino, so there is essentially no natural shade at the water’s edge. There is no shop or village: the kiosks are the only source of food and drink at the lagoon, which makes bringing your own water, sun cover and something to sit on the difference between a good day and a long one. Sanitation facilities are limited and are one of the things the rehabilitation plan is meant to fix.

Jellyfish blooms happen here as they do everywhere in the central Mediterranean; a large bloom of mauve stingers washed into the Blue Lagoon in March 2022, and Maltese jellyfish reporting sites are worth a look before you commit to a swimming day.

Finally, expect the rules to move. The cap has been publicly attacked from both directions, with the party Momentum calling in June 2026 for it to be halved to 2,000 and for half of the remaining places to be reserved for residents, while enforcement of the existing slots has been repeatedly documented as weak. Check the official booking site shortly before you travel, and if you want the lagoon at anything like its best, plan it as an early swim followed by a walk to the tower, then take the boat on to Gozo or back to Malta before the afternoon fleet arrives.