Sliema
Malte centraleLa promenade où tout Malte se balade, nage depuis les rochers et râle contre les nouvelles tours.
Ce guide est pour l'instant rédigé en anglais. L'essentiel est traduit.
Le lieu aujourd'hui
Sliema is where the island promenades. Any evening, the front between Exiles and Fond Għadir fills with joggers, prams, retired couples on their passiġġata (evening stroll) and teenagers with ice cream. The sea is right there, and locals swim off the flat rocks from May to late October, some in the Victorian bathing pools cut into the stone for modest sea-bathing. Behind the front it is Malta's densest town: old townhouses with painted gallariji (closed wooden balconies) squeezed between apartment blocks, and everyone has an opinion about which side won. Tas-Sliema people were long teased for being the anglicised sinjuri (the well-off), and you will still hear more English than Maltese along Tower Road. As a base it is hard to beat: the Valletta ferry takes ten minutes, buses 13 to 16 cover the useful routes, The Point mall sits on Tigné, and the best thing costs nothing: Valletta's bastions seen from the Tigné seafront at golden hour.
Comment il en est arrivé là
Two centuries ago this was open coast: a watchtower, a few farmhouses, and a chapel of Our Lady whose greeting, 'Sliem għalik, Marija' (Hail Mary), most likely gave the place its name, from sliem, peace. The Knights left their final mark just before the end: Fort Tigné, completed in 1795, three years before Napoleon turned up. It was the British century that made Sliema, when Valletta's better-off families built summer houses across the water and then stayed. The Stella Maris church opened for worship in 1855 and became a parish on Christmas Day 1878; by the early twentieth century Sliema was Malta's fashionable seaside town, crossing to Valletta by ferry (as it still does), with the Il-Fortizza battery already standing on Tower Road. Wartime bombing aimed at Fort Tigné and the harbour approaches did damage, but peacetime rebuilt Sliema hardest: from the 1960s the villas gave way to flats, and Tigné Point's towers rose on the old barracks in the 2000s. It is now the densest locality in Malta, and still the best evening walk.
