The Pjazza Teatru Rjal, set in the ruins of the Grand Opera House As part of the City Gate and Parliament project the ruins have been cleaned up and now hold an open-air theatre. The Grand Opera House, which was once one of Valletta’s most iconic buildings, was almost completely destroyed by a German bomb in 1942. Next door to the Parliament building is a reminder of how much Malta suffered in World War II. This gate is the fifth on the site and replaced one built in the 1960s, so don’t be too shocked by how modern it is! It was designed by Renzo Piano, who also designed the Maltese Parliament building next door, as well as the Shard in London. The new City Gate is a good place to start your visit to Valletta. A street right out of Inception The Valletta City Gate and Parliament area Valletta is surprisingly hilly – streets rise up and drop down like something out of Inception. The ferry lands in a tiny harbour and it’s a steep climb up to the new City Gate and Parliament building on Triq ir-Repubblika. The fort isn’t open to the public at the moment apart from on rare open days but there’s a plan to restore it so more people can see inside. On our first full (healthy) day in Malta we took the Sliema Ferry across to Valletta, passing Manoel Island with its star-shaped fort on the way. Sliema is right across the harbour from Valletta, and as we walked along the waterfront later on, we got a beautiful view of Valletta shining in the evening sun.Īlthough we didn’t love Sliema, it makes a great base for a trip to Malta – as well as a direct-ish bus from the airport, there are direct buses to Valletta, Mdina, St Julian, Cirkewwa (for the ferry to Gozo) and other parts of the island. We caught our first glimpse of its golden rooftops on the bus from the airport to our hotel in Sliema. Valletta is the European Union’s smallest capital city with just 6,500 inhabitants and was very different to any of the capitals we’d visited so far on our EUtour. We had to prioritise – which of Malta’s sights did we really want to see? We had to go to Valletta to wave a flag for our EUtour project, and we decided to spend our second day taking a leisurely trip to the former capital, Mdina. So we’d originally planned to have a whopping three full days in Malta, but a bug wiped us out for our first day on the island. What to see and do in Valletta and Mdina on a whistlestop 48-hour visit to Malta.
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