The Visitor Centre & the Ridge

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.

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.

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.

The centre is where the ticket is bought and where the visit is meant to begin. Beyond the café and the toilets it holds a small exhibition on the temple period, built around the film, the model and the replica stones. It is not a museum of finds: the original statues and carved stones from both temples are in Valletta, and what is here is there to explain them rather than to display them.

Before is better than after, if only by twenty minutes. The model shows how the two temples sit on the slope, which is hard to grasp from inside either, and the film gives the background that the stones themselves do not. In high summer there is a case for the reverse: the temples while the morning is still cool, and the exhibition, indoors, when the ridge is at its hottest.

About two hours covers the centre, both temples and the path between them at an unhurried pace, which is the short route of this walk. Adding the cliff path, the memorial and the tower, or going on to the Blue Grotto, makes it closer to half a day. The time that usually runs short is Mnajdra’s, at the bottom of the slope, with the climb back still to come.

Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra are two of the Megalithic Temples of Malta, a single UNESCO World Heritage Site with Ġgantija on Gozo and the temples of Tarxien, Ta’ Ħaġrat and Skorba. Ġgantija was listed first, in 1980, and the others joined it in 1992.

The same culture cut the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, an underground burial complex near Tarxien, which is a World Heritage Site of its own. Tarxien stands among the houses of a town; these two stand on an empty ridge above the sea, and the setting is a good part of the reason to come.