St Julian's
Central MaltaFishing boats at Spinola, Malta's nightlife strip up the hill, and a greasy pole every August.
The place today
St Julian's is really three places wearing one name. Down at Spinola Bay, brightly painted fishing boats still ride at anchor in front of the restaurants, and the old men still curse the lampuki (dorado) season the way their grandfathers did; the LOVE sign by the water is where every visitor takes the same photo. Up the hill is Paceville, the nightlife district Malta both loves and pretends to disapprove of: free entry, cheap shots, best avoided if you are over 25 or it is before 11pm. And in between sits ordinary St Julian's: Balluta Bay with its neo-Gothic Carmelite church and its morning swimmers, band club terraces, office workers from the gaming companies queueing for lunch. In late August the festa takes over, and the ġostra (men sprinting up a greased pole angled over the sea to grab a flag) draws half the island to the water's edge. Buses 13, 14 and 16 run from Valletta, or walk the front from Sliema.
How it got here
For most of its history this was a scatter of fishermen's huts around two sheltered bays, with a small chapel to St Julian, patron of hunters, built in 1580. The Knights used the coast for summer estates, the finest being Spinola Palace, built in 1688 for the Italian knight Fra Paolo Raffaele Spinola, whose name stuck to the whole bay. The British added barracks and villas as Sliema's growth spilled north, and St Julian's became a parish in its own right in 1891. The real transformation came after the war, once tourism took off in the 1960s: hotels along St George's Bay, then Paceville's bars, then the Portomaso marina development, whose 98-metre tower was Malta's tallest from 2001 until the Zaha Hadid-designed Mercury Tower (122 metres, with its odd mid-air twist) overtook it up the road in Paceville. Through all of it, the festa of San Ġiljan on the last Sunday of August still ends the summer with fireworks over Spinola Bay.
