Malta: the back story

About Malta: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Malta Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Malta is small, about 588,000 people at the end of 2025 (NSO Malta), on three inhabited islands in the middle of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily. Visit Malta counts more than 7,000 years of history here, and almost every power that has sailed this sea has left a mark: the temple builders, the Phoenicians and the Romans, the Arabs, the Knights of St John, Napoleon and the British.

The temple builders

Long before Egypt’s pyramids, farmers on Malta and Gozo were raising great stone temples. Heritage Malta dates Ġgantija on Gozo to between 3,800 and 2,000 BC; Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra, on the south coast, are over 5,000 years old, and the underground Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum was in use from 4000 to 1500 BC. The temples and the Hypogeum are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Phoenicians, Romans and Arabs

Phoenician traders used the islands’ harbours, and the Romans built Melite on the ridge where Mdina and Rabat stand today: the mosaics of the Domvs Romana, found in 1881, survive from a noble town house (heritagemalta.mt). Outside the old city walls, St Paul’s Catacombs are the earliest and largest archaeological evidence of Christianity in Malta. The Arab centuries left the language: Maltese is a Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet, with a vocabulary that also draws on Italian and English.

Read the islands from the bottom up: temples, catacombs, a knights’ city, a naval harbour, and a young republic on top.

The Knights and the siege

In 1530 the islands were granted to the Knights of St John, a military religious order of nobles from across Catholic Europe (visitmalta.com). In 1565 they held out against the Ottoman fleet in the Great Siege, and in 1566 they began a new fortified capital on the Sceberras peninsula, named Valletta after their Grand Master, Jean Parisot de Valette. Its cathedral, St John’s, holds Caravaggio’s Beheading of St John the Baptist; the eight auberges, the palace and the bastions still shape the city. UNESCO lists the whole of Valletta.

French, then British

In 1798 the Knights surrendered to Napoleon. The Maltese rose against French rule and, with British help, drove the French out in 1800; the Treaty of Paris confirmed British possession in 1814 (visitmalta.com). For the next century and a half, Malta was the base of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. In 1844 the British built the Royal Naval Bakery in Birgu to William Scamp’s designs, to supply the Mediterranean Fleet (heritagemalta.mt). English became, with Maltese, an official language, and the British left red pillar boxes, driving on the left and a taste for tea.

The George Cross

In the Second World War Malta was besieged from the air. Heritage Malta records that 17,000 tonnes of bombs fell on the islands, and Valletta’s people moved into shelters cut into the rock. In 1942 King George VI awarded the George Cross to the island fortress of Malta, its people and defenders; the cross is now part of the national flag and is shown at the National War Museum in Fort St Elmo.

A nation in the European Union

Malta became independent within the Commonwealth in 1964 and a republic in 1974. The last British forces left in 1979, a departure the Maltese mark each year as Freedom Day. Malta joined the European Union in 2004 and the euro in 2008 (visitmalta.com).

What you see today

All of this sits within a day’s reach. You can walk from a Neolithic temple to a Roman villa, take a boat across a harbour defended by the Knights, and finish in a former naval bakery turned museum. Few places hold so much history so close together.

Our advice: start with the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, then see the temples; the Hypogeum must be booked weeks ahead.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Malta: the back story before you go.