Les Trois Cités (Birgu, Senglea, Cospicua)
Grand HarbourLà où l'histoire du port maltais s'est vraiment écrite : plus calmes que La Valette, plus fières, et toujours vivantes.
Ce guide est pour l'instant rédigé en anglais. L'essentiel est traduit.
Le lieu aujourd'hui
Face Valletta across the Grand Harbour and you are looking at where urban Malta began: Birgu (Vittoriosa), Senglea (L-Isla) and Cospicua (Bormla), three towns so tangled together that nobody agrees where one ends. This is dockyard country (generations of the south earned their bread here until the yard wound down in 2010), and it still feels like it: washing strung between balconies, men tinkering with boat engines along the marina, the każin (band club) bar selling Cisk lager at prices Sliema has forgotten. Birgu has scrubbed up, with yachts below Fort St Angelo, wine bars near the Inquisitor's Palace, and Birgufest in October, when the streets go candlelit. Senglea and Bormla stay stubbornly ordinary, which is the charm: walk Senglea's spine street out to the vedette at Gardjola Gardens, carved with an eye and an ear, then eat fried rabbit somewhere the waiter knows every other table. Come over on the ten-minute ferry or, properly, by dgħajsa (traditional water taxi).
Comment il en est arrivé là
Birgu is older than everything around it: a medieval harbour town huddled under the Castrum Maris, the sea castle that became Fort St Angelo. When the Knights of St John arrived in 1530 they made it their capital, and in 1565 it bore the full weight of the Ottoman Great Siege alongside the new town Grand Master Claude de la Sengle had laid out on the next peninsula in the 1550s. Victory earned the towns their titles, Vittoriosa and Invicta, and Bormla's later fortifications earned it Cospicua, 'the conspicuous'. The Cottonera Lines, begun in 1670 under Grand Master Nicolas Cotoner, wrapped all three in bastions. The British turned the creeks into their Mediterranean dockyard, which is why the Luftwaffe pounded the area so hard: the raids on HMS Illustrious in January 1941 levelled much of Senglea. The dockyard wound down by 2010; Fort St Angelo reopened after restoration in 2015, and regeneration is creeping in, American University campus included.