The Lascaris War Rooms

The British began the tunnels in 1940, extending passages the Knights had left in the bastion, once it was clear that Malta would be bombed heavily. By 1943 the complex was the island’s war headquarters.

The fighter control room, with its plotting table, controllers’ gallery and wall of clocks, directed Malta’s Spitfires on the strength of radar plots and telephone reports. The plotters moving counters across the table were largely local women in their twenties.

In the summer of 1943 the rooms became the headquarters for the invasion of Sicily, the largest amphibious landing of the war until Normandy. Eisenhower, Montgomery, Cunningham and Tedder worked from here in the days around the landings on 10 July.

The first Allied landing in Europe was therefore run from a hole in the rock beneath a public garden in Valletta.

The Royal Navy kept the rooms, and through the Cold War they served as a NATO communications centre for the Mediterranean until 1977. They were then locked, flooded and largely forgotten for close to thirty years, before the heritage trust that runs the Saluting Battery restored and opened them in 2009.

The name comes from Jean Paul Lascaris, Grand Master in the 1640s and 1650s, whose bastion and wharf lie below. He is remembered locally mainly for his sourness; a Maltese phrase for a glum face still invokes him.