Fort St Angelo

A medieval castle called the Castrum Maris stood here, and almost certainly something Roman before it. When the Knights of St John reached Malta in 1530, homeless after the Ottomans took Rhodes from them, this rock was what they were granted, and they made it their base.

For the next four decades the fort was the Order's headquarters and Birgu around it was the capital in everything but name.

After Fort St Elmo fell across the water at the end of twenty-eight days, the Ottoman army turned on Birgu and Senglea. Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette, then seventy, moved his command into this fort and remained there. A chain boom was drawn across the mouth of the creek to shut enemy boats out.

Breaches were opened again and again, and each one was contested at sword length. By the time the siege lifted in September the town behind the fort had been reduced to rubble, and it took a new name: Vittoriosa, the victorious.

The Royal Navy held the fort from 1800, and in 1933 it went on the Navy List as a vessel. HMS St Angelo was a stone frigate: a captain, a ship's company and a commissioning pennant, all attached to a rock that had never floated.

Standing in the middle of what the Luftwaffe most wanted to destroy, it was hit repeatedly during the Second World War; the figure usually quoted is sixty-nine direct hits.

Most of the fort is now a museum, and its batteries and ditch are open to walk. An agreement of 1998 handed the upper part back to the modern Order of St John along with limited extraterritorial rights, which leaves the rock as one of the stranger addresses in Europe: museum, monument, and a corner belonging to a sovereign entity that governs no territory of its own.