Xlendi
GozoA fishing inlet squeezed between cliffs, now Gozo's supper table: fish restaurants a few steps from the water.
The place today
Xlendi is what happens when a fishing village gets popular and decides, on the whole, to stay small: the cliffs won't allow anything else. The bay is a narrow slit at the end of a dry valley, with a short promenade of fish restaurants where the luzzijiet (traditional painted boats) used to be hauled up. A few still are. Locals swim off the flat rocks on the south side, then follow the steps cut into the cliff round to Caroline's cave and the rock pool at Il-Kantra, carved out in the nineteenth century so nuns could bathe unseen. Walk up the other side to the 1650 watchtower for the sunset; in winter, come to watch storms fling spray right over the restaurant awnings. The first Sunday of September is the festa (village feast) of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, when the bay fills with swimming races and a ġostra: a greased pole over the water that young men fail to climb, repeatedly, to general delight.
How it got here
Amphorae keep coming up from the seabed off Xlendi: Punic and Roman wrecks came to grief on the shallow reef across the mouth of the bay, which tells you sailors used this inlet for well over two thousand years. Even the name is nautical: it likely derives from chelandion, a type of Byzantine galley that sheltered here. For centuries afterwards the problem was pirates, and the answer arrived in 1650: Xlendi Tower, proposed by Bailiff Baldassare de Demandolx, paid for by the Università (the local governing council) of Gozo, and today the oldest free-standing coastal watchtower surviving on the island. It kept watch until 1873, when the British stood down the coastal guard, and sat derelict until Din l-Art Ħelwa, Malta's national trust, and the Munxar council restored it. The chapel by the bay went up in 1868 and was rebuilt in the twentieth century; the fishing families' cottages behind it became guesthouses in the 1960s, and Xlendi has been Gozo's seaside supper room ever since.
