Malta Discovery Guide

Malta compresses five thousand years into a place you can cross in an hour. The megalithic temples were built between 3600 and 2500 BC and are among the oldest free-standing structures in the world. The Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, an underground temple found by accident in 1902, admits 80 people a day and no more. Valletta, laid out from a foundation stone of March 1566 after the Great Siege, is at 0.61 square kilometres the European Union's second-smallest capital, and a World Heritage Site since 1980.

The main travel issue

Scale: over 2.3 million visitors a year on 316 square kilometres, buses and beaches full in July and August, and a sun that delivers 3,000 hours a year.

The solution

Come in the shoulder months, when the sea is still above 20 degrees from June to November, and give Gozo and the temple sites the days that the Valletta waterfront would otherwise absorb.

• Comino
• Gozo
• Malta Island

If you travel slowly

Take the ferry to Gozo and stay. The crossing is about 25 minutes and the island's Ġgantija temples are among the oldest free-standing buildings anywhere; its capital, Victoria, has the traffic, and everywhere else has the quiet. Mdina, the capital until the Knights arrived in 1530, has 242 residents inside its walls and earns its name of the Silent City after the day-trippers leave.

If you want to see the essentials

Valletta and St John's Co-Cathedral; the Hypogeum, booked well ahead because only 80 people a day go in; and one of the temple sites -- Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra stand together above the south coast, Tarxien is in a suburb. The three World Heritage inscriptions cover the city, the Hypogeum and the temples between them.

If you seek local character

Listen to the language: Maltese is Semitic in its bones and Latin in its alphabet, and the country switches to English without effort. Catholicism is 94 per cent of the population and the parish festa calendar is the summer's real timetable. The Grand Harbour, bombed as intensively as anywhere in the Second World War and awarded the George Cross that is still on the flag, is the place where the country's story is most visible.

If you want to go beyond the obvious

Comino's Blue Lagoon is on every excursion boat from Sliema and Buġibba between March and December, so go early or out of season, and walk the rest of an island that has two permanent residents. Filfla, the islet off the south coast, is a bird reserve closed to visitors; its storm petrels and shearwaters are what you are looking at from the temples at dusk.

Malta is a Catholic country by 94 per cent of its population, and the church and the parish set the calendar: each town's festa, with its band clubs and fireworks, is the event of its summer. The country's self-image is of a small nation that has been held by everyone and absorbed by no one -- the Knights' capital, the British fortress, the republic of 1974 -- and that kept a language of its own through all of it.

That language is the clearest sign. Maltese is a Semitic language, the only one officially written in the Latin script, and it shares the constitution with English; a visitor hears the two switched mid-sentence and reads street names in one and shop signs in the other. The British century left the language, the driving side and the habit of institutions; the Knights left the buildings; the older layers left the place names.

The Second World War is closer here than in most of Western Europe. The islands were among the most intensively bombed areas of the war, the George Cross awarded in April 1942 is on the flag, and the harbour towns that were flattened were rebuilt by the people who live in them. Independence in 1964, the republic in 1974 and the departure of the last British forces on 1 April 1979 are the milestones people still count from.

The pressure is on very little ground. Over 2.3 million tourists in 2017 came to 316 square kilometres, and they concentrate further: Valletta's 0.61 square kilometres, the Blue Lagoon on Comino, where excursion boats from Sliema and Buġibba run from March to December to an island with two residents, and Mdina, whose 242 inhabitants live inside a town that has not grown past its walls. The useful thing a visitor can do is arrive early, stay longer in fewer places, and give Gozo a night rather than a day.

The prehistoric sites are fragile by design. Heritage Malta admits 80 people a day to the Hypogeum and regulates its microclimate because the painted chambers cannot take more; book early, and do not treat the temples above ground as picnic grounds. Filfla has been a bird reserve since 1980 and a natural reserve under its own Act since 1988, with landing restricted; it holds an estimated five to eight thousand pairs of storm petrels and a wall lizard found nowhere else, and it is best admired from the shore.

Water is the islands' oldest constraint. Rain falls mainly in winter and the summer is dry; a densely populated country hosting several times its population in visitors each year has no water to spare in August. Short showers and a refilled bottle are not gestures here.

January–February -- the coolest months, with daytime highs of 12 to 20 degrees and most of the year's rain; Valletta's museums and Mdina to yourself, and the winter bus fare in force.

March–April -- the temple sites and Gozo's countryside in green, before the heat; the excursion boats to Comino start in March; Easter fills every parish.

May–June -- the best window: the sea passes 20 degrees in June and stays there until November, the days are long, and the summer crowd has not yet arrived. Book the Hypogeum before you book the flight.

July–August -- peak, and the warmest month is August with highs of 28 to 34 degrees and nights of 20 to 24; more than 12 hours of sunshine a day in July. The Blue Lagoon, the buses and Valletta's streets are at capacity; this is the season for the festa and for the water.

September–October -- the sea at its warmest, 26 degrees in August and still above 20 in autumn, the heat easing and the crowd thinning; the ferry to Gozo and the temple sites are at their best.

November–December -- the rain returns and the sea drops toward its winter 15 to 16 degrees, but December still averages more than five hours of sunshine a day; the excursion boats wind down and the islands belong to the Maltese.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Year-round relative cost index vs country average

Higher — Valletta, Sliema and St Julian's in season

Average — the rest of Malta Island

Lower — Gozo, and everywhere in winter

Fares checked against Malta Public Transport's, Gozo Channel's and Heritage Malta's own pages; the relative bands are editorial judgment and change with the season.