Much of the potential joy of a Mediterranean vacation is undermined if you don’t speak the local language. It’s difficult to eat at the interesting, non-tourist-trap restaurants; you often end up shopping at overpriced tourist stores; and your only conversations are with people whose job it is to be multi-lingual—cabdrivers, hotel staff, waiters, and so forth.
But what if there were an island where you could have lunch at every authentic café without pointing and gesticulating like a stupid tourist, shop at the same stores as the locals, then carouse into the small hours every night in delightful sidewalk restaurants?
Well, you can do all this on the island of Malta, not just because a lot of the residents speak English but because nearly every single one of the 500,000-person population does. Perfectly.
Most Americans I ask think Malta must be somewhere in Spain, but it is actually a former British colony (hence English being its main language) that, with its two neighboring islands, sleepier Gozo and uninhabited Comino, manages to roughly equal the borough of Queens in square mileage. Moored between Sicily and Libya, it’s the smallest and most southerly independent country in the European Union.
Like any self-respecting Mediterranean holiday destination, it has beaches. Eighty of them, in fact, many of which have great swimming. It has its own interesting cuisine—sort of Italian meets Middle Eastern, with lots of native rabbit. It also has its own unique and impenetrable language, somewhere between Italian and Arabic, which is alive and well but secondary to English.
But Malta also has history. It had history almost before there was history, with well-preserved remains of mysterious megalithic settlements going back 6,000 years.
In its more recent past, because of the island’s strategically important position in the Mediterranean, everyone from the Romans and the Phoenicians to Napoleon and the British colonized it, each leaving behind magnificent buildings and piles of remains. The capital, UNESCO-listed Valletta, is for me the most beautiful and most interesting city in the Med. You could walk around it for days marveling at the architecture. (Note: bring sneakers—the steep, cobbled streets are not for good shoes.)
It’s not just the capital, either, that’s stuffed with antiquity. Wherever you go in Malta, even around its modern resorts, you’re surrounded by notable architecture. In particular, don’t miss Mdina, half an hour’s drive from Valletta, a car-free city on a hill that dates back to the 8th century and was Malta’s capital until the 16th century. The gate to Mdina was used as the entrance to King’s Landing on Game of Thrones.
With the more expensive and overrun Sicily just 60 miles away, Italians are the biggest tourist contingent in Malta, with British visitors second. The point has been made, indeed, that Malta is a kind of English-speaking Sicily. British people over 70 or so remember that in 1940s and 1950s London, a Maltese Mafia ran gambling and prostitution until they were run out of town by the Albanians. One of the leading Maltese London gangsters, “Big Frank” Mifsud, lived out his days playing cards with tourists in a Valletta bar.
Among other interesting and little-known facts about Malta: the entire population won the George Cross bravery medal from Britain during World War II for withstanding a prolonged, 24-7 siege by German and Italian planes and warships; Britney Spears, Bryan Adams, Meghan Markle, and the outgoing U.S. secretary of transportation Pete Buttegieg (whose name means “lord of the poultry” in Maltese) are all part Maltese; the British actor and roustabout Oliver Reed died in a drinking competition in Valletta while filming Gladiator; and Queen Elizabeth lived there for two years with Prince Philip and loved it.
The latter’s semi-derelict home, Villa Guardamangia in Pietà, close to Valletta, is being slowly transformed into a museum and events venue, but can still be seen almost as it was left by the royal couple in 1951. Tours can be arranged privately with the government conservation body, Heritage Malta, and fascinating they are, too.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of quirky Maltese facts, the renowned Knights of Malta, a thousand-year-old Catholic philanthropic organization considered a sovereign country under international law (although one with a population of just three citizens) isn’t actually in Malta. It was for a while in the 16th century, but now it is based in Rome. The Knights do, however, have an army integrated into the Italian military, and embassies in 113 countries, including an embassy to Malta itself, known as the Embassy of the Sovereign Order of Malta to Malta.
So far, so downright odd. But as well as a ton of peculiar quirks and the Mediterranean perquisites of fine beaches, good bars and restaurants, a big, loud clubbing scene for those who need it, barely any crime, no graffiti, and a ridiculous amount of history, Malta has another, less expected attraction: culture in industrial quantities. More than any normal person could consume.
Concerts, recitals, performances, museums, exhibitions, readings, carnivals, and fiestas go on year-round. A cathedral in Valletta has a pair of Caravaggios. One of them, The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, is the largest he ever did. The artist lived in Valletta in the early 17th century.
Opera is big, too. Malta’s smaller inhabited island, a quarter the size of Des Moines, Iowa, with a fifth of its population, has two opera houses, this an aspect of Malta’s semi-Italian vibe.
The Maltese government wants their increasingly prosperous little nation to move on from being a user-friendly holiday spot for British families to become a destination for sophisticates. An influx of ambitious restaurants and boutique hotels (Iniala Harbour House, in Valletta, and Cugó Gran Macina, in Senglea, are among many) is one example of this upscaling toward what the vacation industry calls “quality tourism.”
But equally key are the arts. On top of the burgeoning of cultural happenings, as of late last fall, Malta has a contemporary-art museum that aims to be a showcase for both up-and-coming Maltese artists and for non-Maltese of international standing.
The Malta International Contemporary Art Space (MICAS), a $30 million, 90,000-square-foot steel-and-glass gallery burrowed into 17th-century rock fortifications a 20-minute walk from central Valletta, is on par with what you would expect in a small, wealthy U.S. city.
MICAS doesn’t have its own collection, but will host leading contemporary painters and sculptors from across the world, invited by its artistic director, Edith Devaney, who was curator of the Royal Academy of Arts in London for nearly 25 years, ran David Hockney’s office in L.A. for two years, and was involved in the last European art museum start-up, Guggenheim Bilbao, a Frank Gehry–designed franchise of the New York museum.
Whether becoming an international modern-art center will make Malta a bigger attraction for visitors is unknown, but there has been a “Bilbao effect” in the wake of the Guggenheim’s opening in that city in 1997. The once dilapidated Basque region saw an uptick in tourism and has since become one of Spain’s wealthier areas.
Malta’s ascendancy was happening before MICAS, however. A year ago, Bloomberg flagged it as a destination to watch in 2024; there’s already a trickle of upscale American visitors, tourist officials say, and there’s talk of direct flights from the U.S. in the future. It’s currently a bit of a schlep, involving a connection through Rome.
As Bilbao can attest, art and culture add depth and purpose to a vacation visit. Most tourists want more than a beach, and there’s a limit to how many cafés you can sit in to watch the passing scene.
As the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, whose massive, arresting fabric sculptures form the first show at MICAS, told AIR MAIL over lunch in Valletta, “What is so brilliant about MICAS is that it adds so much to a holiday. And because it is different every time you come to Malta, it’s never, ‘Oh, we went there last vacation.’ It’s a timely acknowledgment that tourism needs something other than churches and coffees, and I am certain it’s going to put this amazing little country on the map.”
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
