Stop 02 of 25
Hastings Gardens
The other harbour, and a governor’s hand
Free to hear. You have 3 of three free stops left, on any tours.
Guide to Hastings Gardens
A flight of steps just inside City Gate climbs onto St John’s Bastion, where a small garden looks out over Marsamxett Harbour, Manoel Island and Sliema. It is the quieter of Valletta’s two harbours and the view most visitors never see; it is also the clearest place in the city to read how the landward defences fit together.
The bastion and the cavalier
St John’s Bastion and St James’s Bastion flank City Gate, and behind each stands a cavalier, a raised gun platform that let artillery fire over the bastion in front of it. Hastings Gardens sits on top of St John’s Bastion, with the back of St John’s Cavalier beside it, so the whole arrangement — ditch, wall, cavalier and a clear field of fire — is laid out in one view.
The gardens were planted in the nineteenth century, once the British were satisfied that nobody was going to bombard the land front again.
Manoel Island
The star-shaped fort in the middle of the harbour was begun by the Order in 1723, finished in the 1750s, and named for the Grand Master who paid for it, António Manoel de Vilhena. It closed the one gap in Valletta’s defences: an enemy holding the island could have shelled this side of the city from a few hundred metres away.
Before the fort the island held the Lazzaretto, the quarantine hospital where ships from plague ports waited out their forty days. The fort was bombed hollow in the Second World War and has since been restored; it opens for tours.
The governor and his hand
Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Marquess of Hastings, had governed British India before he was sent to Malta as governor in 1824. He died at sea off Naples two years later, and the neoclassical monument in the gardens is his.
His will asked that his right hand be removed and preserved so that it could eventually be buried with his wife, which it was, in Scotland, years later. The remainder of the marquess is here.
What to look at
- The angle of the bastion face below the parapet — built to be fired along, not out from
- Fort Manoel’s star plan, easiest to see from up here
- The gap between Manoel Island and Tigné Point, where the harbour meets the open sea
Practical
- Terrain
- A flight of steps up from Republic Street. The gardens are level, and the walk comes back down by street, without steps.
- Shortcut
- If steps are a problem, skip this stop; the walk continues on the level from City Gate.
Walk to stop 03 · The Ruined Opera House
Leave the gardens along Pope Pius V Street behind the cavalier, then drop down St John's Cavalier Street and Ordnance Street to Republic Street, without steps. The sunken square of stone columns is just across the street; stand at the railing above it.
About 6 min · 334 m
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