Southern Malta

Overview

Southern Malta is the lower third of the main island, running from the harbour suburbs of Paola and Tarxien down to the fishing harbour at Marsaxlokk, the container port at Birżebbuġa and the cliff-edge temples above Wied iż-Żurrieq. It is not a formal administrative unit: it corresponds roughly to the eleven local councils of the old South Eastern Region, abolished in the 2021 reorganisation of Malta’s regions, plus the Paola and Tarxien end of the harbour conurbation.

What holds it together is prehistory. Three of the six sites in the UNESCO Megalithic Temples of Malta inscription stand in this corner of the island: Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra above the southern cliffs, and the Tarxien Temples inside a residential street grid. The separately inscribed Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, an underground burial complex cut into limestone at Paola, is a few minutes away. Add the bone deposits at Għar Dalam near Birżebbuġa and you can cover several hundred thousand years of the island’s record inside a 12 km radius.

The rest is working Malta. Around 70% of the Maltese fishing fleet moors at Marsaxlokk. The Malta Freeport, established in 1988 and described as the third largest transshipment and logistics centre in the Mediterranean, sits directly across the water from the beach at Birżebbuġa. Malta International Airport is in Luqa, on the region’s northern edge.

Expect an unglamorous landscape between the highlights: quarries, greenhouses, a power station on the Delimara headland, warehouses along the airport road. The south does not present itself as a resort, which is part of why the temples still sit in open fields and why Sunday morning on the Marsaxlokk quay is a market rather than a performance.

History & character

Human occupation in southern Malta begins in a cave. Excavations at Għar Dalam in the second half of the 19th century recovered animal bones, the earliest deposited over 160,000 years ago, from species that crossed Ice Age land bridges from Sicily: elephants, hippopotami, deer, bears and wolves. The topmost cultural layer holds evidence of early Neolithic people who brought the first domestic animals over around 7,400 years ago.

The temple builders followed. Ħaġar Qim went up on a ridge above the sea, with a façade containing the largest stone used in Maltese megalithic architecture at 57 tons and an upright menhir 5.2 m high; Mnajdra stands 497 m downhill, aligned so that sunlight passes through the main doorway along the major axis at the equinoxes. At Tarxien, four megalithic structures were built in the late Neolithic and readapted in the Early Bronze Age, when new arrivals turned parts of the site into a cremation cemetery.

The villages themselves are mostly a product of the Knights and the British. Żejtun was raised to city status in 1797 by Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch, who gave it the title Città Beland, and its people resisted the French during the blockade of 1798 to 1800. Paola was founded in 1626 when Grand Master Antoine de Paule laid the foundation stone of a new town to take pressure off the harbour settlements; the British built the Corradino prison there in 1842, on the model of Pentonville. Fort Delimara, on the headland east of Marsaxlokk, was built between 1876 and 1878 and still holds four 38-ton rifled muzzle-loading guns, the last anywhere standing on their original carriages and platforms.

The character today is village Malta with heavy industry attached. Band clubs, parish rivalry and summer festi run the social calendar; the Freeport cranes and the power station run the skyline.

See & do

The prehistoric belt

Four sites carry the region, all managed by Heritage Malta and all bookable through its own site rather than through resellers.

Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra share one archaeological park at Qrendi with a visitor centre, and cost 10.00 euro for adults, 7.50 euro for seniors, youths and students, and 5.50 euro for children aged 6 to 11. Both temples sit under protective shelters put up in 2008. The visitor centre and Ħaġar Qim are accessible to visitors with reduced mobility; Mnajdra, downhill, is not.

The Tarxien Temples cost 6.00 euro for adults and 3.00 euro for children, and have a dedicated walkway that is fully wheelchair accessible. The spiral and animal reliefs are the reason to come; the most vulnerable originals were moved to the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta.

The Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum is the hardest ticket in the country: 35.00 euro for adults, 20.00 euro for youths aged 12 to 17 and seniors, 15.00 euro for children aged 6 to 11, with infants under 6 not admitted. Only ten people are inside at any one time, photography is banned for conservation reasons and one buyer can take a maximum of four tickets.

Għar Dalam charges 6.50 euro for adults on a combined ticket with the Bronze Age site of Borġ in-Nadur. The cave runs 144 m into the hillside but only the first fifty metres are open, and the Victorian bone displays in the Joseph Baldacchino Hall are among a handful left in Europe.

The water

The Blue Grotto is a set of sea caverns below Qrendi, reached by boat from the small harbour at Wied iż-Żurrieq. Locals call the main arch il-Ħnejja. Boats run daily depending on weather, which in practice means they stop when the swell gets up.

St Peter’s Pool, on the north-eastern point of the Delimara peninsula, is the region’s best-known swimming spot: a small bay of smooth flat rock, about 4,357 m2 of water, with a cave at the western end. There is no sand, no lifeguard and no shade, and since 2022 fences and warning signs have been put up about falling debris from the eroding cliffs. People jump from the ledges, but nobody checks the depth for you and getting out is harder than getting in.

Towns and churches

Beyond the ticketed sites the pleasures are ordinary: the Sunday fish quay at Marsaxlokk, the promenade circuit at Marsaskala, the baroque parish churches at Żejtun and Qrendi, both by Lorenzo Gafà.

Towns & cities

Marsaxlokk

The fishing village on the region’s eastern bay, with 4,206 residents in 2024 across 4.7 km2 and around 70% of the Maltese fishing fleet moored off the quay. Fishermen sell fresh fish directly on the quay on Sundays; the rest of the week the stalls turn towards souvenirs and clothes. The full account is on the Marsaxlokk page.

Birżebbuġa

A coastal town of 12,467 residents in 2024, of whom 3,999 were foreign nationals. Its sandy beach, Pretty Bay, is popular with Maltese families and looks straight at the Malta Freeport gantries. If a container terminal in the frame ruins a beach for you, this is not your beach. Għar Dalam and Borġ in-Nadur are both within the boundary, 500 m apart.

Marsaskala

The biggest town in the region, with 18,317 residents in 2024 and past 20,000 in summer, the eighth largest urban area in Malta. It grew from a fishermen’s village into a residential and holiday town, and the long inlet is edged by promenade and low shelving rock rather than sand. St Thomas Tower, one of the Wignacourt coastal towers, stands above the bay, and the national swimming pool complex at Żonqor Point has a 50 m Olympic pool and a 25 m pool.

Żejtun

An inland town of 12,783 people built around two medieval cores. St Catherine’s parish church, designed by Lorenzo Gafà, had its foundation stone laid in 1692 and was consecrated on 11 May 1742. The older church of St Gregory, rebuilt in 1492, was the first church in Malta given the form of a Latin cross, and its feast on Easter Wednesday fills the town. A Roman villa with olive oil production evidence has been excavated here.

Żurrieq and Qrendi

Two neighbouring inland villages that between them own the south-western coast. Żurrieq has 12,731 residents, the harbour of Wied iż-Żurrieq, a restored windmill at Xarolla with catacombs found beneath it, and the islet of Filfla within its boundaries; its parish church of St Catherine was built between 1632 and 1658 and the festa falls on the first Sunday of September. Qrendi is much smaller, with 3,324 people, and holds Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra, an octagonal Cavalier Tower unique in the islands, a parish church completed in 1720 by Gafà, and the Maqluba sinkhole, which opened during a storm in 1343.

Paola and Tarxien

Two adjoining harbour-edge towns that run into each other and into Fgura. Paola has 9,815 residents and the Basilica of Christ the King, the largest church in the Maltese Islands, consecrated in 1967; the Hypogeum is cut into the hill beneath its streets. Tarxien has 9,901 residents and a parish dating from 1592, one of Malta’s oldest. Neither is scenic; both are where you go for the archaeology, twenty minutes from Valletta.

The airport villages

Luqa, Gudja, Kirkop, Ħal Safi and Mqabba ring the runway. Mqabba, population 3,714, is Malta’s quarry and fireworks village: its St Mary Fireworks Factory won the Malta International Fireworks Festival in 2006 and the Caput Lucis world championship in 2007, and its big displays run to the Assumption in mid-August.

Food & drink

Fish is the point. Marsaxlokk is where the catch lands, with around 70% of the national fleet based there, and fishermen sell it on the quay themselves on Sunday mornings. The row of restaurants along that quay is the region’s main eating strip and is priced accordingly, particularly for Sunday lunch. Away from the waterfront, in Żejtun, Żurrieq, Marsaskala and Birżebbuġa, you are eating in ordinary village places at ordinary village prices.

What to look for is seasonal rather than particular to any one kitchen. Lampuki, the dorado that runs through Maltese waters in autumn, is the fish the whole country waits for, and late September to November is when it appears on boards along the coast. Otherwise the south eats what the rest of Malta eats: rabbit, ftira, pastizzi from a hole in the wall for well under a euro, and the bean paste bigilla.

On a temple day, note which sites feed you: Ħaġar Qim and Għar Dalam both list food and drink on site, while the Hypogeum and Tarxien do not, and there is nothing to buy down at Mnajdra.

Nature

The southern coast is limestone, not sand. From Delimara round to Wied iż-Żurrieq the shoreline alternates between low rock shelves you can walk onto and cliffs that drop into deep water, and the swimming spots are coves in that rock rather than beaches. Pretty Bay at Birżebbuġa is the main exception.

Għar Dalam is the best place to understand how the islands were populated by animals. When Ice Age sea levels dropped, species crossed from Sicily on land bridges and were then trapped when the water rose, evolving in isolation under what biologists call the island rule, with large herbivores shrinking and small animals growing. The site is part of the Natura 2000 network, partly because the cave shelters an endemic cave woodlouse, Armadillidium ghardalamensis, and roosting lesser horseshoe bats.

Inland, the south is farmed hard: field walls, greenhouses under plastic, vine trenches cut into rock. The valleys running down to the sea, Wied Dalam and Wied Żembaq behind Birżebbuġa among them, hold what is left of the natural cover. The Delimara peninsula is the one long coastal walk in the region, roughly 2.4 km from the neck of the headland to the lighthouse past the power station.

Climate

Southern Malta has a Mediterranean climate with a long dry summer and a short concentrated wet season. Using Open-Meteo’s ERA5 reanalysis normals for 1991 to 2020 at a point in the middle of the region, monthly mean daily maxima run from 14.3C in February to 27.9C in August, with mean daily minima from 11.4C to 24.4C. These are grid-cell reanalysis values over a very small island, so they smooth out the daytime peaks a land station in an inland village would record. Treat them as the shape of the year rather than as thermometer readings.

Rain is almost entirely a November to February business. The same normals give 68.5 mm in December, 65.2 mm in November, 52.8 mm in January and 51.3 mm in February, against 0.5 mm in July, for an annual total of about 375 mm. Days with at least 1 mm of rain average ten in December and 0.2 in July.

The sea lags the air by about two months. Open-Meteo’s marine reanalysis for the water off Marsaxlokk gives daily mean sea surface temperatures peaking near 28C in August and bottoming out around 16C in February and March, with October still above 24C. That is why the swimming season here runs well past the end of the tourist season.

The wind that names the region matters too. The sirocco blows off the Sahara, is most common in autumn and spring with peaks in March and November, picks up moisture crossing the Mediterranean and arrives warm, humid and often carrying red dust. Marsaxlokk takes its name from it: xlokk is the Maltese word for that south-easterly quarter.

When to go

April to early June is the best window. The temples are open, the light is good, ERA5 normals put April maxima near 17C and May near 20C, and rainfall has already collapsed to 14.0 mm in April and 6.3 mm in May. The sea is still cold in April and only just tolerable in May, so this is a walking and archaeology season rather than a swimming one.

September and October are the other strong window, and arguably the better one if you want both. The water is still around 27C in September and above 24C in October, while air temperatures have dropped back and the rain has not properly started. Lampuki season overlaps.

July and August are hot, dry and crowded, and the exposed sites are uncomfortable at midday: there is no shade at Mnajdra, none at St Peter’s Pool and none on the Delimara walk. Do the temples at opening time and the coast in the late afternoon. It is also festa season, a reason to come rather than avoid it: Marsaxlokk’s is the last Sunday of July, Birżebbuġa’s the first Sunday of August, and Mqabba’s fireworks run to the Assumption on 15 August.

November to February is the wet quarter and the season when boat trips at Wied iż-Żurrieq are least reliable. It is fine for the indoor and sheltered sites, and the temples are quiet.

Getting there

Malta International Airport sits inside this region, at Luqa, southwest of Valletta. It handled 8,957,451 passengers in 2024, up 14.79% on the previous year, which is worth knowing when you estimate queues in August. Practically every visitor to Malta lands in southern Malta, whether or not they then stay in it.

Malta Public Transport lists routes 71, 72, 73 and 119 among its airport services, alongside four Tallinja Direct routes that start and end at the terminal. Routes 71, 72 and 73 head towards Żurrieq and Qrendi, which puts the Blue Grotto side of the region within one bus of arrivals. Taxis and ride-hailing reach most southern towns in fifteen to twenty-five minutes.

By bus from Valletta, the numbered routes fan out across the south: 81 and 85 to Marsaxlokk, 80, 82, 82A and 82B to Birżebbuġa, 84 to Żejtun, 91, 92 and 93 to Marsaskala, 74 to Żurrieq and 83 to Santa Luċija. Tallinja Direct route TD10 also serves Marsaxlokk.

From the Three Cities or Sliema and St Julian’s the south is a short hop by road but a slow one by bus, because most services route through Valletta. From Gozo and Comino it means crossing the island from Ċirkewwa, a bus change and the best part of two hours.

Getting around

Driving is on the left, as everywhere in Malta. A car is the honest answer for this region: the temples, the coves and the villages are spread thin, and the walk from a bus stop to somewhere like St Peter’s Pool is long, unshaded and on a rough track. Ħaġar Qim and Għar Dalam both provide parking at the site. Parking on the Marsaxlokk seafront on a Sunday is a different proposition, and worth avoiding.

Buses work well between the towns and badly to the coast. A single ticket on day routes costs 2.00 euro in winter and 2.50 euro in summer, valid for two hours with free transfers inside that window; night routes and Tallinja Direct services cost 3.00 euro, and TD1 costs 3.50 euro. A 12 single day journeys card costs 19.00 euro, is shareable and lasts six months from first use. The Explore Adult 7 Day card is 25.00 euro and the child version, for ages 4 to 10, is 7.00 euro. Explore Flex, which adds the airport service, is 21.00 euro for four days or 27.00 euro for seven.

Between sites the useful distances are short. Mnajdra is 497 m downhill from Ħaġar Qim inside the same park, and Borġ in-Nadur is 500 m from Għar Dalam. The Hypogeum and the Tarxien Temples are walkable from each other, and Heritage Malta puts the nearest bus stop two minutes from the Hypogeum and five from Tarxien.

Practical info

Heritage Malta runs the ticketed sites and its rules are uniform across them. Last admission at every museum and site is 30 minutes before closing, and all of them close on 1 January, Good Friday and on 24, 25 and 31 December. Hours vary by site and season, so check the agency’s own page rather than a third-party listing before you set out.

Hypogeum tickets

Regular tickets are sold from any Heritage Malta site and through the Heritage Malta online store. Last-minute tickets, twenty of them, can only be bought one day before the visit on a first-come first-served basis, cost 50.00 euro, and are sold from Fort St Elmo and the Gozo Museum of Archaeology until 12:00, after which the National Museum of Archaeology, the Domvs Romana and the Hypogeum itself can also sell them. Book through heritagemalta.mt and nowhere else. Resellers cannot get you a slot the agency has not released.

Money and language are as elsewhere in the country: euro, with both Maltese and English official, so you will be understood everywhere. Village shops and smaller cafés still prefer cash for small amounts.

Two honest expectation-setters. First, the industrial backdrop is not incidental: the Freeport at Birżebbuġa, the 537.8 MW Delimara power station near Marsaxlokk and the airport approach over Gudja and Kirkop are all part of the view. Second, several sites you may read about are not casually visitable: Tas-Silġ is closed except to groups by appointment, Fort Delimara is not on the regular circuit, and Filfla cannot be landed on at all.