Vittoriosa Waterfront

The galleys of the Order were built, repaired, provisioned and laid up in this creek, and the buildings along the waterfront were their support: warehouses, a bakery, chandlers, and vaulted stores driven back into the rock. Several of the arcaded facades are eighteenth-century naval buildings that have simply changed tenant.

It helps to picture the ship. A galley was low and oar-driven, quick across a flat calm and helpless in weather, and it needed two or three hundred men aboard, most of them pulling. That crew — slaves, convicts and paid oarsmen together — had to be housed, fed and guarded within walking distance of the water. The Three Cities were not a suburb of the Knights' capital; they were the machinery that made the Order function.

From 1800 the same logic was applied by a far larger organisation. These creeks became the principal dockyard of the Mediterranean Fleet, and for roughly a century and a half the men of Birgu, Senglea and Cospicua worked in the yard.

When the dockyard ran down in the twentieth century the three towns lost their reason for existing almost overnight, and the marina that replaced the shipping did not arrive until the 2000s.