Upper Barrakka Gardens

Directly opposite, on the finger of land pointing towards Valletta, is Fort St Angelo, the Order's headquarters during the siege. Around and behind it are the Three Cities — Birgu, Isla and Bormla, renamed Vittoriosa, Senglea and Cospicua by the Order after the fighting ended.

In May 1565 an Ottoman army of perhaps thirty thousand came ashore against roughly six thousand defenders, most of them Maltese rather than knights. The fighting then ran for four months along the shoreline opposite: wave after wave thrown at the walls of Birgu and Senglea, mines driven beneath the bastions, and a great chain drawn across the creek to shut enemy boats out of it. By the time the siege lifted in September, something like a third of the defenders had been killed and the towns across the water were ruins.

The garden itself came later, around 1661, and was not built for visitors. It was a retreat for the knights of the Italian langue, and it was originally roofed — an arcaded loggia giving shade.

It lost its roof in 1775. An uprising against the Grand Master had just been put down, and the Order reasoned that a covered space where men could meet unseen was a space where plots were made. The gardens were opened to the public in 1824, under British rule.

The busts include Winston Churchill, who met Roosevelt in this harbour in 1945 on the way to Yalta, and there is a memorial to Lord Strickland. The one worth seeking out is Les Gavroches: four ragged children cast in bronze, clinging to one another, by the Maltese sculptor Antonio Sciortino. As a portrait of hardship on the island between the wars it carries more than any inscription in the garden.

At the northern end, the Barrakka Lift drops 58 metres to the waterfront in under half a minute. It is the fastest way down to the harbour and back up again, and a good deal kinder than the steps.