Stop 01 of 12
The Visitor Centre & the Ridge
What a temple is, and what it is not
Guide to The Visitor Centre & the Ridge
The walk begins at the visitor centre on the ridge above the temples, with the two shelters visible below. Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra belong to the older end of Malta’s temple period, roughly 3600 to 2500 BC: a thousand years before the pyramids and among the oldest free-standing stone buildings anywhere. What they were for is not known, and the walk is honest about that.
The size of the claim
Farmers who had crossed from Sicily by boat a few centuries earlier raised the Maltese temples between about 3600 and 2500 BC. Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra are among the earliest. Nothing on this scale had been built in stone in this part of the world before, and when the temple culture ended, abruptly, around 2500 BC, nothing like it was built on the islands again.
Temple is a guess
Nothing was written down. The evidence is the buildings themselves, with their curved chambers, altars, carvings and sun-aligned doorways, and what was dug out of them: statues of hugely fat figures, animal bones and pottery, and not much more. The word temple has stuck because nothing better has, and it is worth holding lightly.
Before you walk
The centre has a short film, a model of the landscape and replicas of the carved stones that were removed to Valletta for safety; inside the temples the originals are represented by copies. One ticket covers both temples and the path between them.
What to look at
- The two white shelters on the slope below, one above the other
- Filfla, the flat island offshore, which stays in view for the whole walk
- The replica carved stones inside the centre, before you see the copies in situ
Practical
- Getting here
- Buses from Valletta stop at the visitor centre; the car park is beside it.
- Facilities
- Café, toilets and shade here; none again until the end of the full walk.
Walk to stop 02 · Ħaġar Qim: the Façade
Go through the visitor centre and out the far side. The surfaced path leads down to the first shelter; stop in front of the temple entrance at the foot of the curved wall.
About 2 min · 110 m