Couvre Porte & the Land Front

An outer work comes first, then a ditch, then a bridge, then a run of gates set deliberately off axis from each other. Forcing the first put an attacker inside a walled pocket overlooked on all sides, with the next opening offset from the one he had just come through.

Couvre porte translates loosely as the gate's covering. The whole arrangement has one purpose: to price the last twenty metres of an attack as high as the defenders could manage.

Across six weeks in 1565 the assaults on Birgu and Senglea came in from the land again and again. Mines were driven under the walls while guns opened holes in the face of them, and the defenders held the gaps by day and closed them again after dark.

When the relief force from Sicily landed in September, this was the line it relieved.

What to see is beneath the galleries rather than in them: a shelter driven into the rock by hand, running to corridors, cubicles for individual families, and a room set aside for births.

Living beside the dockyard meant living beside the target, and when the raids came the town moved down here. Rabat and Valletta did the same thing under their own streets: the island's standing answer to bombardment is the limestone beneath it.