One day in Valletta, on foot

The shape of the place

Valletta sits on a peninsula between two harbours, and it is small — about a kilometre long and six hundred metres across. You can walk from the gate to the far tip in twenty minutes without hurrying. This is the single most useful fact for planning a day here, because it means nothing needs to be done in a hurry, and it means the mistake people make is not running out of time but doubling back.

The city is built on a grid over a ridge. The streets running the length of the peninsula — Republic Street, Merchants Street, Old Bakery Street — are level. The ones crossing them drop away to the water in long flights of shallow steps. Plan along the ridge and use the cross streets deliberately, and the day is easy. Wander at random and you will climb the same hill four times.

Start early, and start at the gate

Every bus on Malta terminates outside City Gate, which makes it the natural start whether you are staying in Sliema, St Julian’s or Birgu. Arriving by ferry from Sliema lands you below the city on the Marsamxett side, with a climb up; the Three Cities ferry lands you at the Waterfront on the Grand Harbour side, where the Barrakka Lift takes the climb out of your legs.

Get there by nine if you can. The cruise groups come up from the Waterfront mid-morning, and between about ten and one Republic Street is a river of people. Before that it belongs to people going to work, which is a different city entirely.

Morning: walk the ridge

Give the first two hours to the city itself rather than to its interiors. The gate and the ditch, the ruins of the opera house left as they fell in 1942, the Auberge de Castille at the highest point, and then the Upper Barrakka Gardens, which is where every first-time visitor should stand before doing anything else: the whole Grand Harbour, the Three Cities opposite, and the Saluting Battery below.

The battery fires at noon and at four. If you want to see it, aim to be at Upper Barrakka by about a quarter to, and understand that the terrace charges a small amount while the gardens above it are free and have the better view of everything except the guns themselves.

From there, work back along the ridge through the squares — St John’s, the Great Siege monument, Republic Square with the Bibliotheca and the statue of Victoria — and you have seen the bones of the city before lunch.

Midday: go inside something

The middle of the day is the worst time to be walking Valletta and the best time to be indoors, particularly between May and September. This is when the interiors earn their admission.

If you only go into one building, make it St John’s Co-Cathedral. The exterior is a plain fortified box and the interior is one of the most extravagant rooms in Europe, with a floor made of four hundred marble tombstones and two Caravaggios in the oratory, one of them the largest painting he ever made and the only one he signed. Admission includes an audio guide of the interior, and it takes about an hour.

The Grandmaster’s Palace and its armoury, and Fort St Elmo with the National War Museum inside it, are the other two that reward a proper hour. All three charge admission and all three change their hours seasonally, so check on the day rather than trusting anything written months in advance — including this.

Lunch, and where not to have it

Republic Street and the square in front of the co-cathedral are where the tourist menus are. Walk one block sideways — Merchants Street, or the top of Old Bakery Street, or the lanes off Strait Street — and the prices drop and the food improves. That is not a secret, it is just geometry: the rent is on the main street.

Strait Street is worth seeing at both ends of the day. By afternoon it is a narrow, photogenic lane with the ghosts of its wartime bar signs still up. From early evening it fills, and on a Thursday to Saturday night it is one of the liveliest streets in the country.

Afternoon: the far end and the water

The second half of the peninsula is quieter than the first and most day visitors never reach it. Fort St Elmo at the tip took the worst of the 1565 siege and the worst of the 1942 bombing, and the walk out to it along either shore is the best hour of the day for photographs.

Come back down the Grand Harbour side to the Siege Bell and the Lower Barrakka Gardens. The bell is rung daily at noon; the gardens are the quietest place in Valletta with a view, and they are free.

Evening

Stay for the light. From about an hour before sunset the limestone turns the colour the postcards claim it is all day, the day-trippers have gone back to their hotels, and the city empties into something like its ordinary self.

If you have the energy for one more thing, the ferry across to the Three Cities takes ten minutes and the view back at Valletta from Senglea point at dusk is the one people remember.

What to bring

None of this is difficult, but the following makes it noticeably easier:

• Flat shoes with grip. The paving is limestone polished by four centuries of feet, and it is genuinely slippery in the wet.
• Water and a hat from May to September. There is much less shade than the photographs suggest, and the squares have none at midday.
• Cash for the small things, though cards work almost everywhere.
• Something with sleeves and a knee-length hem if you intend to go into churches.

Doing it with a guide in your ear

Everything above is the plan. The part that is harder to do from a plan is knowing what you are looking at while you stand in front of it, which is what our Valletta audio guide is for: fifteen stops in the order above, narrated, with the route mapped between them.

The written guide to every one of those stops is free to read on this site, and one stop plays in full for nothing, so you can decide whether the voice in your ear is an improvement on the silence before spending anything.