Valletta

Overview

Valletta is the capital of Malta, a fortified grid of straight streets laid out from 1566 on a rocky peninsula between two natural harbours. The Order of St John built it in the aftermath of the Great Siege of 1565, when the Ottoman fleet spent four months trying and failing to take the island. Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette laid the foundation stone on 28 March 1566, the papal engineer Francesco Laparelli drew the rectangular street plan, and the Maltese architect Girolamo Cassar carried the work forward after Laparelli’s death. The city that bears de Valette’s name became Malta’s capital on 18 March 1571 and has held the job ever since.

The whole city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed in 1980, with some 320 monuments packed into roughly 0.55 square kilometres. About 5,157 people actually live inside the walls, which makes Valletta one of the smallest capital cities in the European Union, and the southernmost in Europe. The practical consequence for a visitor is that everything is walkable: St John’s Co-Cathedral, the Grand Master’s Palace, Fort St Elmo at the tip of the peninsula and the Upper Barrakka Gardens above the Grand Harbour are all within fifteen minutes of each other on foot.

Valletta’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2018 capped a long restoration. Renzo Piano rebuilt the City Gate ensemble, completed in 2014, and his open-jointed stone Parliament House opened just inside it in 2015, so the first thing you see on entering the city is its newest architecture set against 16th-century bastions. Across the water sit the two other faces of the Valletta and the Grand Harbour region: the Three Cities, older than Valletta itself, and Sliema and St Julian’s, where most of Malta’s hotel beds are.

Neighbourhoods

Valletta is one small grid, but it tilts. The upper town around Republic Street, Merchants Street and the squares is the polished part: government buildings, museums, café tables, most of the shops. This is where nearly all visitors spend nearly all their time.

Walk downhill towards Fort St Elmo or down the side streets towards Marsamxett Harbour and the city changes register. The lower town is residential and much quieter: washing strung between the painted timber balconies, band club bars, small grocers, long flights of steps down to the water. Little of it is on any itinerary, which is exactly the reason to walk it, and the harbour-edge streets give views across to Sliema without the crowds of the Barrakka terraces.

Strait Street, Strada Stretta, is the grid’s famous exception. Known to generations of British sailors as the Gut, it was the drinking and dancing strip of the naval era, and the street where jazz first arrived in Malta with Allied crews during the two world wars. It declined after the Royal Navy left and has been undergoing regeneration in recent years, with small bars back in some of the old premises.

Floriana, the suburb between Valletta’s walls and the outer Floriana Lines fortifications, is what you cross to enter the city: the bus terminus, the Triton Fountain (restored in 2018) and the park-and-ride car parks are all here, and it grew from a suburb of Valletta into a town in its own right. Below the bastions on the Grand Harbour side, the Valletta Waterfront is the cruise terminal, a line of converted Baroque warehouses that fills and empties with ship schedules.

See & do

The Republic Street spine

Triq ir-Repubblika, Republic Street, runs dead straight from the City Gate to Fort St Elmo and organises everything else. Start at the gate for Renzo Piano’s Parliament House (2015) and the rebuilt gate itself (2014), then walk downhill past the shops and the courts. St John’s Co-Cathedral is one block off the spine: plain outside, overwhelming gilded Baroque inside, with Caravaggio’s painting of the beheading of St John the Baptist. It opens Monday to Saturday, 09:00 to 16:45 with last entry at 16:00, closes on Sundays and public holidays, and charges €15 for adults, so plan it into a weekday. Further along, the Grand Master’s Palace fills a whole block on St George’s Square, and the street ends near Fort St Elmo, the star fort that took the first blows of the 1565 siege and now holds the National War Museum.

The harbour edge

The Upper Barrakka Gardens give the classic panorama over the Grand Harbour to the Three Cities. On the terrace below, the Saluting Battery fires a gun at 12:00 and again at 16:00 every day; the battery itself is open Monday to Saturday, 09:30 to 17:30, entry €3 for adults, cashless only, and it is worth arriving fifteen minutes early for a spot at the railing. The Barrakka Lift, a 58-metre shaft opened in 2012, connects the gardens with Lascaris Wharf at sea level: €1 for a return trip, and the ride takes about 23 seconds.

Museums and interiors

MUŻA, Malta’s national art museum, opened in late 2018 inside the Auberge d’Italie on Merchants Street, the 16th-century lodge of the Order’s Italian knights; adult entry is €10 and the collection runs from Baroque canvases to modern Maltese work. Teatru Manoel on Old Theatre Street has been staging performances since 1732, which makes it one of Europe’s oldest working theatres; guided tours run when there is no rehearsal, bookable through the theatre’s own site. Casa Rocca Piccola at 74 Republic Street is a 16th-century palazzo still lived in by the de Piro family, who show visitors twelve rooms of the main floor and the rock-cut air-raid shelters beneath it.

Valletta is also the natural base for day trips: buses from the terminus outside City Gate fan out to Mdina, Marsaxlokk and the rest of the island.

Food & drink

Maltese food is honest Mediterranean cooking with Sicilian and British fingerprints, and Valletta is the best place on the island to try it in one compact area. The everyday order is a pastizz, a flaky pastry filled with ricotta or mushy peas, sold from counters for small change; the longer sit-down classics are rabbit, the national dish, slow-cooked stews and whatever fish the boats landed.

Two addresses anchor the scene and both are real institutions rather than tourist inventions. Caffe Cordina at 244 Republic Street has been trading since 1837 and does coffee, kannoli, honey rings and nougat under a painted ceiling, with tables spilling onto Republic Square. Is-Suq tal-Belt, the Victorian covered market on Merchants Street, was built between 1859 and 1861 as the first building in Malta made largely of prefabricated iron, was bombed in 1942, declined for decades, and reopened on 3 January 2018 as a food market and food court after a €14 million restoration.

Beyond the walls, the fish restaurants of Marsaxlokk in the south and the dense dining strips of Sliema and St Julian’s widen the choice, both an easy bus or ferry away.

Nightlife

Valletta’s nights are small-scale and mostly end before they would begin in Paceville. The centre of gravity is Strait Street: the former sailors’ strip known as the Gut, where jazz entered Malta with Allied crews, has been coming back to life under a regeneration programme, and its narrow span now holds a string of small bars in premises that once held music halls. Around it, wine bars occupy cellars and courtyards across the upper town, and on warm evenings the drinking simply happens outdoors on the steps and pavements.

The high-culture end of the evening is strong for a city this size. Teatru Manoel runs a full season of opera, drama and concerts in its 1732 auditorium. Every January the Valletta Baroque Festival, running since 2013, fills St John’s Co-Cathedral, the Manoel and other period interiors with about three weeks of concerts.

If you want clubs, big venues and a late start, that is Sliema and St Julian’s territory, and the two scenes connect: in summer the Sliema ferry runs late into the night, with the last boats after 01:00 and night fares of €3.50 single from 19:30. In winter the ferry stops earlier and the run back is by bus or cab.

When to go

Valletta has a textbook Mediterranean pattern: hot dry summers, mild wet winters, and two long agreeable shoulders. July and August average 27 to 28°C by day with almost no rain at all (0.5 mm falls in an average July), and the humidity on the exposed grid can make midday sightseeing hard work. The rain arrives from late autumn: November to February is the wet window, peaking around 70 mm in December, though even January days average close to 15°C and bad weather rarely lasts.

April to June and September to October are the sweet spots: 17 to 26°C, little rain, and a sea that has had all summer to warm up on the autumn side. Sirocco winds off North Africa can bring sticky, hazy spells at either end of summer.

Winter has its own case: the Valletta Baroque Festival fills the city’s churches and theatres with around three weeks of concerts every January, with St John’s Co-Cathedral and Teatru Manoel among the venues.

Getting there

From the airport

Malta International Airport is at Luqa, a short ride south of the capital, and there is no rail link, so it is bus or road. The Airport Direct 4 (TD4) bus runs every 30 minutes from the airport terminal to Valletta and on to the Gozo fast ferry quay; the flat fare is €3, payable in cash or contactless on board, and no booking is needed. Ordinary routes also connect the airport with the rest of the island, and the airport’s own pages list which numbers go where. Taxis and app-booked cabs (eCabs runs its own app and airport service) wait at arrivals; the road journey into Valletta is short but can crawl at rush hour.

By sea

Ferries matter here. The Sliema ferry crosses Marsamxett from The Strand to a quay below Valletta’s northern walls, roughly every 15 to 30 minutes through the day, €3 single and €5 return; the Three Cities ferry does the same job on the Grand Harbour side from Cospicua. For Gozo and Comino, the Gozo Highspeed fast ferry sails for foot passengers directly from the Grand Harbour in Valletta to Mġarr, while the car ferry crossing runs from Ċirkewwa at the island’s far northern tip, a 25-minute crossing that leaves as often as every 30 minutes in the daytime. Cruise ships berth at the Valletta Waterfront terminal in the Grand Harbour, built from 2002 below the bastions.

By bus from elsewhere in Malta

Malta’s bus network is built around Valletta: most routes on the island start or finish at the terminus just outside City Gate, so from almost any town the capital is a single ride away.

Getting around

Inside the walls you walk. The city measures barely a kilometre end to end, and no bus penetrates the grid; the real obstacle is topography, because the straight streets ignore the contours and several become staircases. Comfortable shoes beat any other piece of kit here.

Two mechanical shortcuts help. The Barrakka Lift drops 58 metres from the Upper Barrakka Gardens to Lascaris Wharf at Grand Harbour level, €1 return, running from 06:30 daily, which saves a long sweaty climb from the ferry and cruise quays. And the two harbour ferries, to Sliema and to the Three Cities, work as public transport as much as sightseeing, every day from early morning.

For everything beyond the walls, buses leave from the terminus outside City Gate. A single ticket bought on board costs €2.00 in winter and €2.50 in summer, valid for two hours including transfers; night and express services cost €3.00. If you are staying a while, the 12 Single Day Journeys card at €19 can be shared between a group, and 7-day unlimited cards cost €25 to €27. Driving into Valletta is not worth the trouble: parking inside is scarce, and the park-and-ride in Floriana exists precisely so you can leave the car outside. Remember that Malta drives on the left.

Where to stay

Sleeping inside the walls is the special option. Valletta’s hotel stock is small and mostly boutique: townhouses and palazzos converted into guesthouses and small hotels, with stone stairs, high ceilings and often a roof terrace looking over the harbours. Rooms are limited and the best places fill early for spring and autumn, so book well ahead; the trade-off for the atmosphere is stairs rather than lifts in many buildings, and street noise on the bar streets at weekends.

Just outside City Gate in Floriana, The Phoenicia Malta is the grande dame, Malta’s first five-star hotel, with seven acres of private gardens running down towards Marsamxett a few steps from the city entrance. Floriana in general is a sensible compromise: quieter and often cheaper than intramural Valletta, with the bus terminus on your doorstep.

Most visitors to Malta actually stay across Marsamxett Harbour in Sliema and St Julian’s, where the big resort and business hotels are concentrated; from Sliema the ferry puts you in Valletta in minutes for €3 single or €5 return by day. The Three Cities on the Grand Harbour side offer the same trick in a quieter key, with waterfront apartments and small hotels and their own ferry link to Valletta.

Practical info

Opening rhythms

Valletta keeps office hours more than resort hours. St John’s Co-Cathedral closes on Sundays and public holidays and stops admitting at 16:00 on other days; the Saluting Battery closes on Sundays too. Plan the big sights for weekday mornings and keep Sunday for the harbours, gardens and ferries. Several sites, the Saluting Battery among them, are cashless and cheaper booked online.

Tickets and passes

Heritage Malta operates many of the capital’s sites, including Fort St Elmo, the Grand Master’s Palace and MUŻA, so check its site for current hours, combined tickets and closures before queuing anywhere. For the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, book through Heritage Malta only and do it early; last-minute tickets, when they exist at all, are sold only one day ahead.

Money, language, essentials

Malta uses the euro, and Maltese and English are both official languages, so getting by in English is effortless; signs and menus in Valletta are overwhelmingly bilingual. Card payment is the norm at sights and restaurants. For country-wide practicalities, visas, healthcare and emergency numbers, see the Malta country guide.

If you are bus-hopping from Valletta for several days, the shareable 12-journey card (€19) or a 7-day unlimited card (€25 to €27) from Malta Public Transport pays for itself quickly, and single tickets bought on board are valid for two hours of transfers.

Places to visit

Other

• Fort St Elmo — Valletta’s seaward star fort and the National War Museum
• Grand Master’s Palace — The Knights’ seat of power and the Palace Armoury
• St John’s Co-Cathedral — The Knights’ golden church and Caravaggio’s largest canvas
• Upper Barrakka Gardens — Free bastion terrace over the Grand Harbour