Baie de Saint-Paul, Buġibba et Xemxija

Be honest about what this is: three places wearing one name. San Pawl il-Baħar proper is the old core around the harbour, where the parish church looks over moored boats and Gillieru, the old-school fish restaurant, practically stands in the sea. Buġibba is the holiday grid bolted on in the 1960s (amusement arcades, karaoke pubs, three-star hotels), and it is now, improbably, the centre of Malta's biggest town: 32,000 residents at the last count, closer to 40,000 today, speaking most of the EU's languages between them. Xemxija, across the bay on its quiet ridge, is where you go when Buġibba gets too much. It sounds like package tourism, and partly it is, but at 7am the promenade belongs to the town: lap swimmers off the rocky lidos, anglers, pensioners with the paper. Simar, in the bay's inner elbow, is a reed-bed bird reserve most visitors never find, and the view from Xemxija hill at sunset costs nothing.

The name records Malta's most famous shipwreck: in about AD 60 a grain ship carrying Paul of Tarsus to trial in Rome broke up on this coast (the Acts of the Apostles gives the story two chapters), and tradition dates Maltese Christianity from that winter. The bay's record is far older. A megalithic temple of the third millennium BC survives, surreally, in the grounds of Buġibba's Dolmen hotel, and the Xemxija ridge keeps Punic tombs, rock-cut apiaries and a stretch of Roman road. In 1610 Grand Master Wignacourt completed his first coastal watchtower here, the oldest still standing in Malta, to guard a bay that had invited every raider going. For centuries afterwards this was a fishing hamlet where Valletta families spent their summers. Then came cheap flights and Buġibba's concrete grid in the 1960s. Between 2011 and 2021 the population nearly doubled to 32,042, the largest of any Maltese locality, and the cranes have not stopped since.

Le lieu aujourd'hui