Dwejra et San Lawrenz
GozoLa Fenêtre d'Azur n'est plus ; la mer intérieure, Fungus Rock et la côte la plus sauvage de Gozo demeurent.
Ce guide est pour l'instant rédigé en anglais. L'essentiel est traduit.
Le lieu aujourd'hui
I won't pretend: the Azure Window is gone, and the first time you stand where it used to be feels odd. Then Dwejra gets to work on you. The Inland Sea is still here: a pebble lagoon behind the cliff, where boatmen run you out through an eighty-metre tunnel in the rock for a few euro, engine echoing, into open water the colour of ink. The Blue Hole still swallows divers every morning, and the window's collapsed stones have become a dive site of their own. Fungus Rock still guards the bay's far side. Walk it in the late afternoon, when the tour groups thin out and the garigue (rocky scrubland) smells of thyme. Up the road, San Lawrenz is a one-square village with a handsome church and the Ta' Dbieġi crafts village on its edge: glass-blowers, lace, honey. On 10 August the village keeps its festa (village feast) of St Lawrence under the Perseids, which locals call the saint's tears.
Comment il en est arrivé là
The Knights took Dwejra seriously for an unlikely reason: a dark, knobbly plant growing on the flat-topped rock in the bay. 'Malta fungus' (actually a parasitic flowering plant) was prized across Europe as a cure for wounds and dysentery, and the Order guarded its monopoly fiercely. Dwejra Tower went up in 1652 under Grand Master Lascaris partly to watch over it; by 1744 Grand Master Pinto had banned all access to Fungus Rock, smoothed its sides against climbers, and rigged a ropeway from the cliff: thieves risked the galleys. The Azure Window, a sea-cave arch that time cut through the headland, made Dwejra famous in the tourist age; it appeared in Clash of the Titans and, in 2010, hosted the Dothraki wedding in Game of Thrones. It collapsed entirely into the sea during a gale on the morning of 8 March 2017. San Lawrenz became a parish in its own right on 15 March 1893, and the novelist Nicholas Monsarrat settled here at the end of the 1960s to write The Kappillan of Malta.
