Dingli
The westMalta's highest village, where the island simply stops: 250-metre cliffs, one cliff-edge chapel, and very little fuss.
The place today
Dingli is where Malta runs out. The village itself is a quiet knot of streets around its church (under four thousand people, one good band club, not much to detain you), and then the road tips over the edge of the escarpment and the island simply stops, 250 metres above the sea. The cliffs are the show. Locals drive up on Sunday afternoons for the passiġġata (evening stroll), an ice cream from the van by the little chapel of St Mary Magdalene, and rabbit at Bobbyland, a gloriously unfussy place where fenek (rabbit, the national dish) comes with chips and no ceremony. The white golf ball on the skyline is an aviation radar, not a temple. It stands where RAF Dingli once watched the sky. Walk the edge north towards Buskett woodland, or inland to Clapham Junction to squint at the cart ruts. Sunset here beats any rooftop bar in Sliema, and it's free.
How it got here
The plateau behind the cliffs was in use long before the village existed. The bare rock up here is scored with cart ruts (parallel grooves probably worn or cut in the Bronze Age, though nobody has settled the argument), and where dozens of pairs cross at Misraħ Għar il-Kbir, British servicemen nicknamed the tangle Clapham Junction. Beside the ruts, whole families lived in the Għar il-Kbir cave complex until the authorities cleared the last cave-dwellers out in the 1830s. The Knights left the grandest marks: in 1586 Grand Master Hugues Loubenx de Verdalle had Girolamo Cassar build Verdala Palace above the Buskett woodland as a hunting retreat (today it is the President's summer residence), and the tiny chapel of St Mary Magdalene was rebuilt on the cliff edge in 1646. In 1939 the RAF planted one of its earliest radar stations outside Britain on these cliffs, and it watched the approaches from Sicily right through the war. The village stays modest: 3,865 people at the last census, the islands' highest ground at Ta' Dmejrek (253 metres), and weather with opinions.