St Paul's Grotto and Catacombs (Rabat)

 

It is not unreasonable to describe St Paul's Grotto in Rabat as Malta's most sacred location - at least if you are of the Christian persuasion.

Certainly this humble cave is held in such esteem in the Christian world at large that the last two Popes who came to Malta (Benedict and John Paul) both paid a visit to this shrine.

The grotto is located beneath St Paul's Church in Rabat, and for a mere five euros you can walk in the footsteps of the pontiffs, and of St Paul himself of course.  According to legend, this is where Paul stayed for three months after his ship foundered on the Northern Maltese coast, and from where he spread the word of Christianity to the Maltese population.

Xemxija Heritage Trail.

Let's get that tricky pronunciation out of the way first. Xemxija is pronounced 'shem-she-ya'.  X's and Q's are just thrown into place-names in Malta to confuse the foreigners.  The town is in the North of the island, just next to St Paul's Bay, so buses 11, 37, 41, 42, 49, 221, 222, 250 and X1 will all get you there.

Malta is a small and massively overcrowded country, so from time to time you may yearn for proximity with nature and open spaces.  You may also feel that all this restaurant food and cheap wine is not doing much for your waistline.  So to kill two birds with one stone, I recommend you take a morning to go and wander along the Xemxija Heritage Trail.  There is a little bit of uphill to negotiate, and some scrabbly ground underfoot, but it's a nice little walk and you are tripping over ancient history at every turn.  Here are just a few of the sights to be seen:

Roman Road:

So what were you expecting, the Appian Way?  Considering people have been tramping along this road for the past two thousand years, it's really in surprisingly decent shape, especially at the edges.  The ancient Romans used roads like this to transport salt and farm produce around the place, and this also forms part of the route taken by pilgrims on the way to Mellieha to worship at the shrine to Our Lady.  You can see crosses carved into the rock walls where generations of pilgrims have made their mark.

A Very Short History of Malta - Part II

This is a continuation of a very compressed history of Malta.  Here's part one.

Now where were we?  Okay, in 1530, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V decided to give the islands to the Knights of Malta, and all he asked was a trained bird in return payable once a year.  This is where the whole Maltese falcon business comes from.  These knights had been wandering around homelessly for a few years and so were presumably delighted to be granted a base in Malta, from whence to attack whichever Ottomans or pirates they might come across.  In fact Barbary pirates managed to capture Gozo in 1551 and deposit all 5,000 of it's inhabitants on the coast of North Africa, (which is where Barbary pirates came from).

A Very Short History of Malta - Part I

There is a lot of history to get through for such a small island, so I am going to attempt to condense it just a little bit.

Hagar Qim

Let's go right back to when early Sicilians floated over in search of pastures greener and landed about 5,000 years B.C., to become the first known settlers on Malta.  Go and take a look at the Tarxien temples and the Hypogeum among others, and you'll get some idea of what early Maltese got up to in their spare time.  One of the things was probably killing and eating pygmy elephants and hippos, which was a shame.  You can go see the skeleton of one of these at the Ghar Dalam museum. One archeologist even suggested that the discovery of such skeletons may have led to the belief in Cyclops', as the skulls just had one big hole for the trunk which could have been mistaken for an eye socket.  Although he may have been one of those off-the-wall archeologists who believes in lay lines and alien interventions and stuff... Okay, I don't want to get bogged down here, too much history, too little space.  So everybody left the island in 2500BC and about 100 years later a new bunch of bronze age people arrived.