Cittadella

Overview

The Cittadella (Maltese: Iċ-Ċittadella) is the fortified citadel on the hilltop directly above Victoria, and the landmark visible from almost anywhere on Gozo. It is also called the Castello or il-Kastell. Malta has kept it on the national tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites since 1998.

One practical fact shapes the whole visit. The fortress is an open public heritage site, open all year round, 24 hours a day, free of charge, and the Ministry for Gozo recommends walking it after sunset. You pay only to go inside the museums; the streets, the ditch and the rampart circuit cost nothing.

The hill was chosen because it is naturally defensible and dominates the countryside, with views over large parts of the Gozitan coastline and, across the channel, Malta itself. Inside, the plan splits in two. The southern half around Pjazza tal-Katidral holds the Baroque cathedral, the Law Courts, the Bishop’s Palace and the museums. The northern half is largely ruins, most of them medieval, with archaeological deposits beneath. Only a few families still live within the walls.

History

Pottery shows the hill was settled in the Bronze Age, in the Tarxien Cemetery and Borġ in-Nadur phases; silos found outside the walls in the nineteenth century suggest the settlement was then larger than the citadel is now. Through the Phoenician and Roman periods this stayed Gozo’s main settlement, Gaulos: an acropolis here, a fortified town below. A temple of Juno is said to have stood where the cathedral does, and a second century AD Latin inscription from Gaulos was reused as a block in the main gate.

In the medieval period the acropolis became a castle. The first reference to the castrum of Gozo dates to 1241 and the Genoese sacked it in 1274; about a third of the island’s people then lived in or around it, and islanders were required to spend the night inside the walls. From the fifteenth century a suburb, ir-Rabat, spread down the hill: the historic core of Victoria today.

July 1551

Raids were routine, named in sources for fourteen separate years between 1500 and 1550. July 1551 was different in scale. An Ottoman force under Sinan Pasha, with the corsair Dragut alongside him, broke off an attack on Malta and landed on Gozo on 22 July. The Castello was commanded by the knight Galatian de Sesse; its defences were obsolete, its garrison small, and it was packed with the island’s population, who had come inside as they always did. A boat of gunpowder sent from Malta was intercepted, leaving a single English bombardier, killed early on. Several hundred people escaped down ropes on the northern walls around midnight on 23 July, and the garrison capitulated on 26 July.

The terms were not honoured. Forty elderly men were spared, along with a woman about to give birth and the friar who had negotiated. Everyone else inside, roughly 700 soldiers and several thousand civilians, was enslaved and shipped out on 30 July. Early figures range from Bosio’s 5,000 to de Soldanis’s 6,000 to 7,000, and all agree it was the majority of the island’s population. Some were ransomed or freed, some died in slavery, some converted and stayed; most never came back, and Gozo took about a century to repopulate. A memorial to the victims by the artist John Grima, gilded by John Pace, was installed outside the walls in 2016.

Rebuilding began in 1599 to designs by the Italian military engineer Giovanni Rinaldini, directed by Vittorio Cassar, and finished around 1622. The vulnerable southern side became a bastioned enceinte in the Italian manner: a central bastion linked by curtains to two demi-bastions, stiffened by two cavaliers, wrapped in a ditch, a covertway and a very steep glacis. The northern walls kept their medieval line, which is why the two halves feel so different underfoot. Everything but the glacis survives, which the Ministry for Gozo calls one of the most complete and authentic early seventeenth century bastioned fortification systems in the Maltese islands.

The citadel saw its last action in 1798: the French took it on 10 June, and after the Gozitans rebelled that September the garrison holding it capitulated on 28 October. The British decommissioned the fortifications on 1 April 1868, and shelters were dug under the bastions in the Second World War.

Two European Regional Development Fund projects produced the place visitors see now. The first, begun in 2008, stabilised the fortifications and the bedrock under them for around 7 million euro. The second ran under the Ministry for Gozo from 2014 to 2016 for 14 million: façades restored, ruins bought by the government and consolidated, streets repaved, the ditch turned into public space, accessibility works throughout, and the old reservoirs converted into a visitor centre. It turned up the fortress’s original entrance ramp and drawbridge on the way, and was inaugurated on 30 June 2016.

Visiting

The museums

Start at the Visitors’ Centre, as the Ministry for Gozo suggests: two 1870s water reservoirs in the ditch, now holding touch screens and panels on the citadel’s evolution, nature and history, plus a surround theatre showing an eight minute video. Everything is in eight languages.

One ticket, the Ċittadella Combo, covers three places, the Visitors’ Centre, the Old Prison and Gran Castello Historic House, and is valid 30 days from first use: 5 euro adult, 3.50 for youths aged 12 to 17, seniors over 60 and students, 2.50 for children aged 6 to 11, free for infants and Heritage Malta members.

The Old Prison is the one to see even if you skip the rest. It holds the largest known collection of historical graffiti in a single place in the Maltese Islands, cut into the walls of its cells and corridors: mostly sea vessels, including a sixteenth century carrack, but also palm prints, crosses, names, games and scratched tallies of days served. The Knights of St John used it for their own rowdy members, Fra Jean Parisot de La Valette among them, four months in 1538 for attacking a man, years before he became Grand Master.

Gran Castello Historic House is a cluster of interconnected late medieval houses on Triq Bernardo DeOpuo, given over to Gozitan domestic and rural life: a reconstructed household, a room of rural trades built round a beast-driven mill, period furniture and weaving tools upstairs, a garden at the end. The architecture is the quiet surprise, Sicilian and Catalan influence in a sophisticated Late Gothic hand whose quality implies wealthy owners.

The Gozo Nature Museum is free, Tuesday to Sunday, though sections of it closed on 20 March 2026 ahead of the new Gozo Museum. What stays open is the Natura 2000 material upstairs, including a room on the Ċittadella itself as a protected site with rare plants and several bat species, and a back garden of garigue planting facing the cathedral.

The cathedral

The Cathedral of the Assumption was raised between 1697 and 1711 to designs by Lorenzo Gafà, the Maltese architect then also building the cathedral at Mdina, and became Gozo’s cathedral on 16 September 1866.

It has no dome. Look up anyway. In 1739 Antonino Emanuele, a scenographic painter from Catania, painted one on the flat vault, in the tradition of Andrea Pozzo’s false domes in Rome and Vienna. The perspective holds from the floor, down to a lifelike gecko on a painted windowpane; it was restored in 2019. The pavement answers it with tombstone slabs of multi-coloured marble carrying armorial shields and family emblems. The Cathedral Museum next door, renovated in 2021, runs over three levels reached by lift: ecclesiastical silver, then history and memorabilia including a Doric column from the temple of Juno dug out of the cathedral’s own foundations, then some sixty paintings.

The walls and the ditch

The rampart walk is free and it is the best hour on the site. St Philip’s Curtain, between St Michael’s Bastion and St John’s Demi-Bastion, carries a walkway above old magazines now used as craft shops; a clock tower replaced the turret on St Michael’s Bastion in 1858. Down in the ditch, the Second World War shelters and the Knights’ silos are part of the same circuit.

Tips

Which day you come

The fortress never closes and never charges; the paying attractions close on Mondays. From 1 March 2026 through to 3 January 2027, the Old Prison, Gran Castello Historic House and the Gozo Nature Museum open 09:00 to 17:00, Tuesday to Sunday; from 4 January to 28 February 2027 they also shut on Wednesdays. The Visitors’ Centre keeps its own version of that calendar: Tuesday to Sunday from March to December, Wednesdays closed as well in January and February, 09:00 to 17:00 with last admission at 16:30. It also shuts on 1 January, Good Friday and 24, 25 and 31 December.

The cathedral runs on a different calendar, which catches people out. Cathedral, vestry, museum and shop open Monday to Saturday 09:00 to 17:00 and close on Sundays. Tickets come from the cathedral gift shop and are not covered by the Heritage Malta combo: 5 euro adult, 3 euro for seniors over 60, students and children from 11 up, free under 10, and 7 euro for a combination ticket adding the Gozo 360 audio-visual show. So a Monday gives you walls and nothing else, and a Sunday gives you the museums but no cathedral.

Getting up there

On foot, walk up Triq ir-Repubblika to Pjazza Indipendenza, it-Tokk, and take It-Telgħa tal-Belt from its corner. Drivers carry on to Pjazza Savina and turn right twice into Triq il-Kastell, which climbs to a hairpin under the bastions; from there, steps, a public lift or a ramp reach Cathedral Square. The car park beneath the walls is private and normally charges a flat 2 euro a day; free public parking sits near the bus terminus and by the secondary schools. From Mġarr harbour, route 301 runs to Victoria, and the nearest stop is five minutes on foot from the gate.

Access, dress and manners

The restoration installed lifts and removed steps from most passageways, and the Visitors’ Centre, the ditch and the main entrance area are wheelchair accessible. It is still a fortress built on a hill to be inaccessible: most passageways are steeply graded and wheelchair users will need assistance. Audio guides for visitors with diverse needs are at the front desk. The Heritage Malta museums each describe themselves as partially accessible.

The cathedral is a working parish church: dress decently, take a disposable covering at the door if you need one, and avoid narrow heels, which damage the marble floor. Photography is allowed, flash is not, and entry can be refused during weddings and funerals.

Last, the obvious one. The ramparts are open stone with no shade, at the highest point of a small and very sunny island. In July and August, go early or go late.