Xagħra e Ramla
GozoTempli più antichi delle piramidi, un mulino a vento del 1725 e la più bella spiaggia rossa di Gozo in fondo alla collina.
Per ora questa guida è in inglese. Le informazioni essenziali sono tradotte.
Il luogo oggi
Xagħra sits on its own plateau, and it behaves like it: second-largest town on Gozo, with a proper oval square, oleanders, and the Bambina church whose dome you can see from half the island. The order of business is fixed. Ġgantija first, before the heat and the groups. The ticket includes Ta' Kola windmill, its millstones and workshop intact. Then a coffee in the square, then the odd pleasure of the caves: Xerri's Grotto and Ninu's Cave were found by families digging wells, and you still enter them through somebody's house. The Calypso Cave itself is shut, but the viewpoint above Ramla is the best free thing on the island: the whole red crescent of the beach below you, vines and bamboo in the valley. Walk down in twenty-five minutes (the climb back is another story), swim, and take the 302 home. In the first week of September the village goes full festa (village feast) for the Bambina, and good luck sleeping.
Come è arrivato fin qui
People have farmed this plateau for as long as anyone has lived on Gozo. Ġgantija's two temples went up around 3600–3200 BC (older than Stonehenge or the pyramids) from coralline slabs so large that Gozitans credited a giantess, Sansuna, with carrying them on her head. Excavation began in 1827 under Otto Bayer, the island's Lieutenant Governor; UNESCO listed the site in 1980. A few streets away, the Xagħra Stone Circle hid a burial hypogeum used for centuries by the temple people. The Romans left a seaside villa under the sand at Ramla, and the Knights fortified the same bay against landings with a redoubt and an underwater wall: invaders liked sandy beaches as much as we do. Ta' Kola windmill was built in 1725 under Grand Master Vilhena's foundation and ground the village's flour into the twentieth century. The parish church of Our Lady of Victories, il-Bambina, celebrates her feast on 8 September, the day the 1565 Great Siege ended, which is why the whole country takes the day off.
