Stop 19 of 25
The Carmelite Basilica
A dome built to win an argument
Free to hear. You have 3 of three free stops left, on any tours.
Guide to The Carmelite Basilica
The dome that dominates every view of Valletta from the sea belongs to the Carmelite basilica on Old Theatre Street, rebuilt after wartime bombing and finished in 1981. It was designed to stand taller than the Anglican spire two streets away, and it does.
A church since the 1570s
The Carmelite friars arrived as the city was going up and were given a church by Girolamo Cassar. It was altered and enriched over the following centuries and made a minor basilica in 1895. Bombing in 1942 wrecked it.
The decision afterwards was to rebuild on a far larger scale rather than to patch, to a design by the Maltese architect Joseph Damato. Work ran from the late 1950s to 1981.
Why the dome is so tall
The dome rises about forty-two metres and was made deliberately higher than the spire of St Paul’s Anglican Pro-Cathedral, which had ruled the Marsamxett skyline since the 1840s. For a century the tallest thing on that side of Valletta had been a Protestant church paid for by a British queen; the Carmelites wanted the sea to see a Catholic dome first.
Inside
The nave is vast and plain by Maltese standards, lit from the drum of the dome rather than from the walls, without any of the gilded density found at St John’s. A twentieth-century church in a sixteenth-century city, and honest about being one.
What to look at
- The oval plan of the dome, clearest from the far side of the street
- The Anglican spire, visible beyond the rooftops, and which of the two is higher
- The 1950s masonry, cut to the same limestone as the sixteenth-century houses around it
Practical
- Opening
- A working church; open for much of the day around services, with a break at lunchtime. Free.
- Terrain
- Old Theatre Street drops away steeply beyond the church towards Marsamxett.
Walk to stop 20 · St Paul’s Anglican Pro-Cathedral
Continue down Old Theatre Street to West Street and turn right. Independence Square opens on your left, with the pro-cathedral's portico and spire on its far side.
About 3 min · 152 m
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