Malta Geography, Climate & Nature

Malta is an archipelago of low limestone islands in the central Mediterranean: Malta Island, the largest, with the capital and most of the population; Gozo to the north-west across a strait the ferry crosses in about 25 minutes; Comino and its islet Cominotto between them; and Filfla, an uninhabited rock off the south coast. The whole country measures 316 square kilometres, which makes it the world's tenth-smallest, and its highest point, Ta' Dmejrek, is 253 metres above the sea.

The shape of the coast made the history. Numerous bays along the indented shoreline provide harbours, and the Grand Harbour on the east side of Malta Island is the reason the Knights, Napoleon and the Royal Navy each wanted the place. The islands tilt: cliffs on the south-west, where the temples stand, and low shelving bays on the north-east, where the towns and beaches are.

There is almost no surface water. Rain falls mainly in winter and the summers are dry, so the landscape is terraced fields, rubble walls and garrigue rather than woodland, and water has been the islands' constraint for as long as they have been inhabited.

Malta has a Mediterranean climate at its sunniest: around 3,000 hours of sunshine a year, from an average of more than five hours a day in December to more than twelve in July. Rain falls mainly in winter and the summer is generally dry. The average year runs at about 23 degrees by day and 16 by night; in January, the coldest month, daytime highs run from 12 to 20 degrees with nights of 6 to 12, and in August, the warmest, highs of 28 to 34 with nights of 20 to 24.

The sea sets the season more than the air. Its annual average of 20 degrees is the highest in Europe; it sits at 15 to 16 degrees from January to April, passes 20 in June and stays above it through November, and peaks at 26 in August. That is why September and October, with the heat easing and the water at its warmest, are the islands' best weeks.

There is no shade to speak of on a limestone island with few trees, so the summer's heat is felt in full at the temple sites and on the Blue Lagoon's rocks; go early. Best Destinations by Month has the practical reading.

Malta's biodiversity is that of a small, dry, densely settled limestone archipelago, and its distinctive life is in the details: an endemic subspecies of bee that may have given the island its Greek name, and the Maltese wall lizard, which has four subspecies in the islands, all found nowhere else -- one on the three main islands, one confined to the islet of Filfla.

Filfla is the country's clearest conservation story. A bird reserve since 1980 and protected under its own Act since 1988, with access restricted, it holds three breeding seabirds -- an estimated five to eight thousand pairs of European storm petrel, about 200 pairs of Cory's shearwater and about 130 pairs of yellow-legged gull -- and BirdLife International lists it as an Important Bird Area principally for the storm petrels. A door snail is endemic to it as well.

No species-level survey was consulted for this page beyond the sources named in the data file; the figures are indicative.

The wall lizard is the animal a visitor will actually meet: the Maltese wall lizard's four subspecies are all endemic to the islands, and the one found on Malta, Gozo and Comino basks on every rubble wall and temple stone in the sun. The subspecies on Filfla lives only on that islet.

The seabirds are the other thing to watch for. Filfla, the rock off the south coast, holds an estimated five to eight thousand pairs of European storm petrel and some 200 pairs of Cory's shearwater, which is why it has been a bird reserve since 1980 and an Important Bird Area; the shearwaters are seen from the cliffs near the temples at dusk, coming in to the colony.

The sea around the islands is warm -- above 20 degrees from June to November -- and clear, and the Blue Lagoon between Comino and Cominotto is the most visited piece of it. This page says only what its sources say about what lives in it, which is nothing; ask the dive centres, who are the people who know.