St Peter's Pool and a Marsaxlokk Sunday

Get here by eight or don't bother telling me about it. The proper business happens early: restaurateurs and nannas picking over the boxes, vendors shouting weights, ice everywhere, the odd swordfish laid out like a trophy. This is a real market that tourists visit, not the other way round: the fish came off boats you can see from the stall. By half past ten it's souvenir aprons and fridge magnets, and the good catch has gone to somebody else's kitchen. Buy prawns if you've got a kitchen of your own; otherwise just watch the theatre of it, coffee in hand.

The luzzu (Malta's traditional double-ended fishing boat) comes in one colour scheme, all of them: blue, yellow, red and green in fixed bands, with a pair of eyes on the prow to see the boat safely home. Marsaxlokk keeps the biggest fleet, moored in rows off the quay in front of the church. Walk the line and read the names: saints mostly, some mothers, the odd joke. The working boats are the scuffed ones with nets aboard; the immaculate ones increasingly earn their keep ferrying photographers. Both are legitimate careers for a boat, though the fishermen have opinions.

Follow the road out along the peninsula; it climbs gently past smallholdings, prickly pear hedges and rubble walls, with the bay opening up behind you. Yes, that is a power station across the water; Delimara hosts it the way a family hosts a difficult uncle, and after ten minutes you stop noticing. Up on the ridge to your left is Tas-Silġ, a fenced archaeological site that has been a temple to somebody or other for four thousand years. The walk to the pool is about three kilometres, forty minutes at a Sunday pace, longer if you keep stopping to photograph goats.

A horseshoe of flat golden limestone stepping down into deep, ludicrously clear water. The sea built a lido and asked for nothing in return. Sunday is local family day: cool boxes, folding chairs, teenagers auditing each other's jumps off the higher ledges. Getting in is a jump or a scramble; getting out is the sloping shelf at the shallow end, plus whatever grip you brought. There's no sand, no kiosk, no lifeguard and no shade after mid-morning, which sounds like a warning and is actually the sales pitch. On a calm day you can watch fish ten metres down.

Keep south past Kalanka Bay and the peninsula runs out of peninsula: the lighthouse stands at the point with nothing beyond it but shipping lanes and weather. You can't climb the tower, but the reward is the walk itself: open sea on your left, the whole of Marsaxlokk Bay arranged behind you like a model village, freighters queuing on the horizon. The keepers' quarters have been converted into holiday lets, so somebody gets to wake up here; the rest of us take our photographs at the wall and start thinking seriously about lunch.

Lunch is the point of the loop, so don't waste it on the first laminated menu with a picture of scampi. My order of preference: Tartarun, near the church end of the front, for proper fish cooked by people who buy at the same market you walked through. Book it; Sundays sell out. Failing that, one of the honest quay-side places where the day's catch is chalked up and the chips do their job. Between late August and December, lampuki (dorado, the migrating autumn fish) is the only correct answer, ideally as torta tal-lampuki, the pie.