Stop 02 of 12
Ħaġar Qim: the Façade
Twenty tonnes, stood on end by hand
Keep going
Stop one of Ħaġar Qim & Mnajdra plays straight away. The other 11 are one payment:
- Every stop from here to Wied iż-Żurrieq, narrated
- The map following you from stop to stop, hands free
- The whole tour saved to your phone — no signal, no roaming
Not sure yet? Start with The Visitor Centre & the Ridge.
The written guide below is open either way.
Guide to Ħaġar Qim: the Façade
The front of Ħaġar Qim is a long concave wall of upright slabs with a doorway of three stones at its centre. Its largest megalith is over six metres long and around twenty tonnes, raised without metal, wheels or known draught animals. The temple was cleared in 1839, and the soft globigerina limestone it is built of is why a shelter went over it in 2009.
The name and the dig
Ħaġar is stone in Maltese; Qim is read either as an old word for standing or as a corruption of one for veneration. The temple was one of the first on the islands to be excavated, in 1839, by a British officer with a party of soldiers, who found a building that had stood half buried for five and a half thousand years.
Moving the stone
The largest slab in the outer wall is over six metres long and weighs about twenty tonnes. Round stone balls found at several temples suggest rollers; levers, ropes and a great many people did the rest. No one has demonstrated the method. The stone is there regardless.
Why the tent
The ridge is globigerina limestone, the soft golden stone of all Maltese building, which cuts well and weathers badly. By the 1990s five thousand years of sun, salt and rain were taking the surface off in flakes. The shelter went up in 2009 to stop it, and does.
What to look at
- The trilithon doorway: two uprights and a lintel
- The great slab to the right of the entrance, the largest on the site
- The rounded, hollowed faces of the stones — five millennia of weather
Practical
- Ticket
- The temple interiors are inside the ticketed enclosure.
- Terrain
- Level paths; the temple floors beyond the door are uneven original stone.
Walk to stop 03 · Ħaġar Qim: the Chambers
Go in through the trilithon doorway and stop where the passage opens into the first pair of chambers. The floor is original stone and uneven.
About 1 min · 39 m