Grand Master's Palace

Overview

The Grand Master’s Palace (Il-Palazz tal-Granmastru) is the seat of the Office of the President of Malta, and the part of it that Heritage Malta runs as a museum is the biggest historic interior open to visitors in Valletta. It was the first building the Knights of St John put up in their new capital, begun in the 1570s and enlarged for two centuries afterwards. Under British rule it was the Governor’s Palace, in 1921 it took in Malta’s first constitutional parliament, and since 1974 it has housed the presidency.

The building occupies a whole city block. Its main front faces St George’s Square along Republic Street, and the other three sides run along Archbishop Street, Old Theatre Street and Merchants Street. The exterior is deliberately plain: Girolamo Cassar’s Mannerist facade is asymmetrical, rusticated at the corners, and enlivened mainly by two eighteenth century portals with balconies above them and long closed timber balconies wrapping the corners.

Inside, a restoration costing more than 40 million euro reopened the palace in January 2024, and Heritage Malta now gives access to over eighty-five per cent of the building’s footprint: the State Rooms, the frescoed corridors of the piano nobile, the rediscovered Uccelliera, the two courtyards, and the Palace Armoury, moved back into the hall it occupied from 1605 and which served as the parliamentary chamber for four decades. It is the most visited site in Heritage Malta’s portfolio, taking around 300,000 people a year.

Come for the Armoury and the state apartments, and check what is open before you buy a ticket.

History

The palace was not meant to stand here. When the Order founded Valletta in 1566 the Grand Master’s residence was planned for higher ground in the south of the city, which is why present day South Street was originally called Strada del Palazzo. What happened instead was opportunistic. Grand Master Pierre de Monte moved the Order’s headquarters to Valletta in 1571 and lodged in the house of his nephew, the knight Eustachio del Monte, built in 1569 by Girolamo Cassar. The Council bought it, enlargement into a palace began in 1574, and when the Italian langue moved to a new auberge in 1579 its old building next door was swallowed up too.

Successive Grand Masters kept adding. Jean de la Cassière brought the Italian painter Matteo Perez d’Aleccio to Malta in 1577 specifically to record the Great Siege of 1565, and the result is the frieze that runs round the upper walls of the Throne Room: twelve episodes of the four month siege in narrative sequence, separated by allegorical figures. Alof de Wignacourt moved the Order’s arsenal into a large hall at the back of the palace in 1604. Nicolau Nasoni frescoed the main corridor ceilings in 1724, and in the 1740s Manuel Pinto da Fonseca gave the building the shape it still has, embellishing the facade, opening a second main entrance and raising a clock tower over one of the courtyards.

The French turned it into the Palais National in 1798. From 1800 it was the Governor’s Palace, and the British reworked it to their own taste: the Grand Council Hall became the Hall of Saint Michael and Saint George, Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmore encased its walls in neoclassical detailing in 1818 which was stripped out again a century later, and a semaphore station went up on the belvedere in the 1840s. The armoury opened as a museum in 1860, restored under the personal direction of Governor John Gaspard Le Marchant.

Parliament arrived in 1921 and stayed for almost a century, sitting in the hall of the Order’s Gobelins hangings until 1976 and then in the former armoury until the House of Representatives moved out on 4 May 2015. The arms collection had been pushed into two ground floor stables in 1975 to make room for the chamber. Bombing on 7 April 1942 had already damaged the armoury hall, and the collections spent the war in the palace basement and at Girgenti Palace.

The current chapter began in 2018. Heritage Malta’s largest ever project set out to reinstate the Armoury in its original hall, restore the piano nobile corridors and the Uccelliera, and build a visitor centre in the former Palazzo del Monte and Orangerie. The State Rooms shut on 1 February 2020 so that scaffolding could go up in the Throne Room for the conservation of the Perez d’Aleccio paintings, work carried out with the University of Malta’s Department of Conservation and Built Heritage. Along the way the builders kept finding things: the remains of a nymphaeum from the palace’s orange garden, and a cycle of frescoes from the magistracy of Alof de Wignacourt on the upper walls of the bedroom the Grand Masters used in summer, previously known only by word of mouth.

The palace reopened on a Friday evening in January 2024. The bill came to more than 40 million euro, 18 million of it co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund.

Visiting

The entrance is on St George’s Square (Misraħ San Ġorġ) in the middle of Valletta, five minutes on foot from the nearest bus stop. Heritage Malta publishes its hours as seasonal posters rather than as text, and for 2026 they read: 1 March to 31 October, daily 10:00 to 18:00; 1 November to 3 January, daily 09:00 to 17:00; 4 January to 28 February 2027, daily 09:00 to 17:00. The palace opens seven days a week in all three windows.

Admission is 12 euro for adults from 18, 10 euro for youths aged 12 to 17 and for senior citizens over 60, and 8 euro for children aged 6 to 11. Infants aged 1 to 5 go free, as do Heritage Malta members and passport holders. Tickets bought online stay valid for 30 days after purchase, and showing your admission ticket at the site shop gets 15 per cent off the official guidebook.

What is open

The State Rooms on the piano nobile are the headline: the Grand Master’s Study and Sitting Room, the Throne Room, the Pages’ Room and the Ambassadors’ Room, hung with late eighteenth century illusionistic ceiling paintings that show exactly how hard the Grand Masters were working to imitate the courts of Europe. Nine further halls opened on 11 June 2025, all of them previously closed to the public: rooms from the Grand Master’s summer apartment including the Drawing Room, Study, Bedroom and Chapel, plus the Cabinetto di Curiosità, the Conventual Chaplain’s Room, the Treasury Office and three halls given over to thematic displays on the French period, the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George, and the Maltese Parliament.

The Palace Armoury is the other half of the visit and, for many people, the better half. Back in its original hall, it holds armour of the Grand Masters, Ottoman armour and weapons taken in the Great Siege, and a run of artillery pieces; Heritage Malta names the suits of Alof de Wignacourt and Jean de Valette among them. It is a fraction of what the Order once stored here, but it remains one of the largest collections of arms and armour still kept in the building it was made for.

The hangings

The palace’s Gobelins hangings came back to their hall in June 2026 after nearly two years of conservation at the De Wit Royal Manufacturers in Belgium. They were part of the gioia, the gift each newly elected Grand Master made to the Order, presented by the Spaniard Ramon Perellos, who took office in February 1697. Commissioned in Paris in 1708 and delivered two years later, they were woven from the cartoons known as the Tenture des Indes and show scenes from lands newly encountered by Europeans at the time. This is the only complete surviving set woven from those cartoons, and it has hung for more than 300 years in the room built for it, the Sala tal-Arazzi, which was itself restored while the hangings were away.

Facilities on site include a food and drink outlet, a gift shop, lockers, indoor and outdoor seating and nappy changing. Accessibility is partial: there are fully accessible toilets, but Heritage Malta states plainly that some areas cannot be fully accessed by visitors with mobility impairment.

Tips

Check the site notices before you commit, especially if you have come for the Great Siege frieze. The Throne Room, where the Perez d’Aleccio cycle runs round the upper walls, is closed to the public until further notice as of September 2026, and on four dates this autumn the State Rooms open only at 13:30, leaving the Armoury as the only thing you can see in the morning. A ticket bought online is valid for 30 days, so it is worth buying only once you know the day.

Go early or late in the day. The palace takes roughly 300,000 visitors a year through corridors and enfilades where the flow is slow by design, and the middle of the day is when cruise groups and school parties overlap. Lockers on site mean you need not carry a bag round the state apartments.

Give the square outside ten minutes of its own. St George’s Square is the principal square of Valletta and faces the palace front; the Main Guard with its neoclassical portico stands at the far end, and the pavement fountain with its water jets dates from the 2009 refurbishment that pedestrianised what had been a car park since the 1980s. It has a heavy past for such a bright space: it served as the Order’s slave market, Dun Mikiel Xerri and 42 other Maltese rebels were executed here by the French on 17 January 1799, it hosted British military ceremonies including the changing of the guard, and it was where the George Cross was presented to Malta in 1942.

Pair the palace with St John’s Co-Cathedral, five minutes down Republic Street: one building for the state, one for God, both built by the same Order in the same decade. The Upper Barrakka Gardens close the loop with the view over the Valletta and the Grand Harbour waterfront.