Three Cities beyond the Walls

There is no better €2 in Malta. The dgħajsa is the harbour's traditional water taxi: high curved prow and stern, painted like a festa (village feast) decoration, these days usually pushed by an outboard rather than oars. You sit a hand's width above the water while the bastions of three cities slide past at eye level, which is how this harbour was always meant to be seen. The boatmen have the unhurried timing of men who have done this forever; some are third generation. Ten minutes, Valletta to Birgu, and the tone of the day is set.

You land among superyachts. The marina berths are now some of the most expensive addresses in Malta, tied up in front of the long honey-coloured sheds that once baked the Mediterranean Fleet's bread: the Naval Bakery, home of the Malta Maritime Museum. Walk the waterfront slowly: gun ports, mooring rings, bollards stamped with the Admiralty's broad arrow. At the far end stands the Freedom Monument, where Malta's last day as a naval base is remembered every 31 March, wreaths in the morning and a rowing regatta in the afternoon.

The fort takes an hour you will not regret. This is the building Malta's history keeps returning to: medieval castle, Grand Master's seat, the command post of the 1565 siege, then a commissioned 'stone frigate' of the Royal Navy. Climb to the upper battery for the view Valletta cannot give you: Valletta itself, laid along its ridge across the water, with the harbour mouth beyond. The very top still flies the flag of the Order of Malta, and these days even that section, Magistral Palace and St Anne's chapel included, opens with your fort ticket. The Knights have mellowed.

Now the part I am biased about. Behind the waterfront, Birgu folds into the Collachio, the small grid of lanes where the Order first installed itself in the 1530s, before Valletta was even a drawing. Triq Hilda Tabone and the alleys off it hold the original auberges, the knights' communal houses, now private homes and a library marked by modest plaques. No shops to speak of, no queue: just gallariji (timber balconies), saints in wall niches, and neighbours who will wish you good morning and then discuss you. Get lost on purpose; the quarter is four streets deep and always lets you out somewhere sensible.

Two minutes on foot brings you to the Inquisitor's Palace, one of very few anywhere that lets you in. Malta's inquisitors were less about burning and more about bureaucracy: the building reads as a magistrate's court crossed with a bishop's flat, which is roughly what it was. The tribunal room has a doorway cut deliberately low, so every accused entered bowing. Downstairs are the cells, where prisoners' graffiti of ships and names is scratched into the limestone; it will hold you longer than anything upstairs. The rest now houses the national ethnography collection.

Walk round the head of the creek (fifteen easy minutes past the marina) into Senglea, which locals call L-Isla, and out along its spine to the garden at the point. On the corner of the bastion hangs the gardjola, a little stone lookout carved with an eye and an ear: the fortress telling the harbour that it is watching and listening. The view is the classic one (Valletta across the water, Fort St Angelo to your right, the open sea beyond the harbour mouth), and the gardjola's window was composing photographs three centuries before anyone owned a camera.

Finish downhill in Bormla (Cospicua on the maps) at Dock No. 1, the stone basin that built and mended ships for a century and a half and now just holds the sky still. The dockyard walls, pump houses and winding stairs are all there, scrubbed up, and students from the university campus in the restored buildings have colonised the cafés. Sit at the water's edge with a drink and look back at where you've walked: fort, auberges, lookout, all one harbour. The ferry back to Valletta leaves from the landing a few minutes away.