Blue Grotto

Overview

The Blue Grotto is a group of sea caves in the cliffs of southern Malta, a short distance east of the small fishing inlet at Wied iż-Żurrieq. In Maltese the site is Taħt il-Ħnejja, “under the arch”, after the natural arch off the headland; OpenStreetMap maps Taħt il-Ħnejja to the attraction and Il-Ħnejja to the cave mouth itself. The caves fall inside the boundary of Qrendi rather than Żurrieq, settled by a legal dispute between the two villages in 1910, which is why the Malta Tourism Authority gives the Qrendi local council as the site contact.

Two quite different visits share the name, and it is worth knowing which one you are planning around.

The first is free and takes ten minutes. On the ridge road above the inlet there is a marked viewpoint, signed Veduta tal-Ħnejja, from which you look down and northeast at the arch with the open sea behind it. The arch sits about 200 m from that railing. This is the photograph almost everyone has seen of the place, and nothing about it depends on the boats running.

The second is the boat. Small open launches leave from the quay in the inlet, run out under the arch and along the cliff face, and put their noses into a string of caves that the boatmen have named: the Blue Grotto itself, Reflection Cave, Cat’s Cave, Window Cave, Circle Cave, Honeymoon Cave, Elephant Foot and Blue Window Cave.

Offshore, low and flat on the horizon, is Filfla, an uninhabited islet 4.5 km south of Malta ringed by 60 m cliffs. It carries a colony of European storm petrels estimated at 5,000 to 8,000 pairs and an endemic wall lizard, and may have been sacred to the people who built the temples on the coast opposite. The Blue Grotto is the coastal half of the standard half day in Southern Malta; the other half is the temple park up the hill, and the two share a bus route.

History

How the boat trips started

The trips are younger than most visitors assume, and the boatmen have published their own account of them. Wied iż-Żurrieq was a working fishing inlet. In the early 1950s British servicemen and their families began coming down to swim and asking the fishermen for a ride round to the caves; the fishermen were usually working, so it was their sons who took people out, until about eight small boats were doing it.

In 1958 the government required a licence. An applicant had to own his boat, have it surveyed as fit to carry passengers, and sit an examination set by the Captain of Ports; the boats, then licensed for three to five passengers, had to carry oars, a life jacket per passenger, a life buoy, a fire extinguisher, a bucket of sand and a long rope. Eight licences were issued that year and four more in 1962, and by 1964 there were 59, more than the inlet could absorb.

The Blue Grotto Boat Service was set up in 1968 to sort that out: a committee, a written statute, and a finding that no more than 25 boats could work in a single day, which is why the boatmen still run in two shifts. The same organisation decides each day whether the sea is safe enough to sail.

The wreck and the islet

Two other pieces of history are visible from the water. On the night of 3 February 1995 a gas explosion in the Malta drydocks tore open the Libyan tanker Um El Faroud and killed nine shipyard workers; the ship was written off and in 1998 was towed out and scuttled southwest of Wied iż-Żurrieq as an artificial reef. Filfla was a Royal Navy and RAF gunnery target until 1971, became a bird reserve in 1980, and was given statutory protection by the Filfla Natural Reserve Act of 1988; spent ordnance is still on it, and access is now allowed only for educational or scientific purposes with permission from the Environment and Resources Authority. A substantial piece of the islet broke away during Storm Harry in January 2026.

Visiting

The boat trip

Tickets are bought at the booth on the quay, not online: the boatmen’s site publishes prices and hours but has no booking function, and the number it prints for the ticket booth, 00356 21640058, is also its main business number.

The English page of that site lists €10.00 for adults and €5.00 for children, with the service running 09:00 to 17:00 in summer and 09:00 to 15:30 in winter, and the flat statement that boats only operate weather permitting. Two honest caveats. The same page in Spanish, Italian and French still shows the older €8.00 and €4.00, so the site is not maintained in step across languages. And archived copies show the English price sitting at €8.00 as late as 21 May 2024, at €10.00 by 25 January 2025 and still €10.00 in April 2026, so the current figure has held for well over a year but is not guaranteed at the booth. Nowhere does the operator publish a trip duration or which payment methods the booth takes, so do not plan a tight connection around it.

The viewpoint

The clifftop viewpoint costs nothing, is open at all hours and is the better of the two vantage points for a photograph, because from the water you are inside the thing you came to see. It sits on the ridge road roughly 150 m east of the bus stop, and a second marked viewpoint stands further along the coast beyond the arch.

Getting there

Route 74 runs Valletta to Żurrieq and calls at the Grotto stop, at the head of the inlet a couple of hundred metres from the quay. On weekdays it reaches the stop from 06:08 to 20:52 and heads back towards Valletta from 05:22 to 21:06, roughly half-hourly at the peaks and hourly in between; on Saturdays it is hourly, 06:11 to 20:13. The run from Valletta takes 38 minutes. Route 201, which links Rabat with the airport, uses the same stop. A single journey on day routes is €2.00 at the winter fare, in force from 19 October 2025 to 13 June 2026, and €2.50 in summer, paid in cash or by contactless card on the bus and valid for two hours.

Ignore the operator’s own transport advice here: its schedule page still sends visitors to route 71, which does not call at the Grotto stop. There is a car park at the inlet, but no source we could check publishes a parking tariff.

Tips

Why mornings

The caves open onto the southeastern coast of the island. That is the physical basis for the standard advice to come early: the sun is still in the east and low enough to reach under the arch and into the cave mouths. Be sceptical of the precise windows quoted on ticket-resale pages. Neither the boatmen nor the Malta Tourism Authority publishes a best hour, and what is actually documented is only that the boats start at 09:00 all year.

Pair it with the temples

Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra sit on the ridge about 1.4 km northwest of the viewpoint, and the Ħaġar stop is four minutes before the Grotto stop on route 74. Doing the temples first and dropping to the water afterwards works well, because the park keeps fixed hours while the boats do not. If the sea has shut the boats down, the temples and the free viewpoint still fill a morning, and Marsaxlokk is the obvious lunch stop afterwards.

Swimming and diving

This is not a beach. The inlet is a narrow rock-sided channel with a quay, and the boatmen note that the water is heavily used by swimmers and that they are sometimes called on to help people in trouble. Getting in means steps and rock, the water is deep straight away, and working boats manoeuvre in the same channel.

For divers the draw is the Um El Faroud, a 115 m tanker lying upright on sand southwest of the inlet. The top of the bridge is at 18 m and the main deck at 25 m, with the seabed at 36 m, and the hull broke in two after a storm in the winter of 2005 to 2006, so how much you can reasonably see depends on your qualification. Snorkelling along the coast and rock climbing on the cliffs are also long established here.

Small things

Coach parties work the viewpoint in blocks through the middle of the day, and the layby is small. The boats are open and take spray, so cameras want a bag. Filfla looks close enough to visit and is not. Nothing here is ticketed except the boat, so a wasted trip costs only the bus fare.