Gozo is the Malta many dream of and few expect: greener, slower, more authentic. A short ferry crossing from the main island, this small territory of farmed hills, golden-stone villages with enormous churches, cliffs dropping into the sea and coves of crystal-clear water feels like it belongs to another time. If Malta moves fast, Gozo takes a deep breath: here rural life, the siesta, the village festa and the sea set the rhythm.
In just a few kilometres, the island packs an astonishing variety. There are the Ġgantija temples, megalithic monuments more than 5.500 years old —older than Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt— built by a civilisation that still amazes archaeologists. There is Victoria, the capital, crowned by the walled Citadel with 360-degree views over the whole island. There is Dwejra, the coastal landscape where the famous Azure Window stood until 2017, now collapsed, next to the Inland Sea and Fungus Rock. And there are Ramla Bay, the red-sand beach of the Calypso myth, and the seaside resorts of Xlendi and Marsalforn.
This guide explores Gozo calmly and practically: what to see beyond the quick day trip, how to get there by ferry, where to swim, how to get around an island where buses are scarce, and why it is worth staying overnight to feel its atmosphere. Because Gozo is not something to gulp down: it is something to savour. And whoever gives it time discovers the most serene, green and human side of the Maltese archipelago.
Gozo has been inhabited for more than seven thousand years, and at Ġgantija it holds one of the oldest temples in the world, the work of a mysterious megalithic civilisation from the fifth millennium BC. Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines and Arabs all passed through the island; the name Gaulos/Gaudos comes from the Romans, and the Maltese Għawdex from Arabic. For centuries, its Citadel was the refuge of the entire population against attacks by pirates and corsairs: in 1551, the Ottoman corsair Dragut raided the island and carried off almost its whole population —some 5.000 to 6.000 people— as slaves, a trauma that marked its history. Under the Knights of St John and later the British, the capital, Rabat, was renamed Victoria in 1887 for Queen Victoria's Jubilee. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The sister islands: greener, more rural Gozo, with the prehistoric temple of Ġgantija and the Citadel of Victoria, and the almost untouched islet of Comino.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Gozo's story begins long before that of almost anywhere else in Europe. More than five and a half thousand years ago, before the pyramids had gone up in Egypt and centuries before Stonehenge, a mysterious Neolithic civilisation built two huge stone temples on a hill in Gozo, next to the present-day village of Xagħra: Ġgantija. Built between roughly 3600 and 3200 BC, they are the oldest free-standing structures in the world after Göbekli Tepe, and in 1980 they became the first of the Megalithic Temples of Malta to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The blocks that make up their walls are colossal: some are more than five metres tall and weigh over fifty tonnes, and they were moved and set in place without metal, without the wheel and without draught animals, by a society of Neolithic farmers. The feat was so hard to explain for the Gozitans of later centuries that they could find only one answer: giants had built them. Hence the name, Ġgantija, 'the giants' place'. One legend says it was a giantess, who lived on broad beans and honey, who raised them with a child hanging from her shoulder.
The reality is just as fascinating. That temple-building civilisation, which flourished on Malta and Gozo for more than a thousand years, built around twenty of these megalithic sanctuaries, probably devoted to a fertility cult and a mother goddess, and then vanished abruptly, for reasons still not fully understood, around 2500 BC. Ġgantija is the oldest and most spectacular record of that lost culture, and proof that Gozo was the cradle of one of humanity's first monumental architectures.
After the puzzling end of the temple civilisation, Gozo stayed inhabited through the Bronze Age and stepped fully into history with the arrival of the great seafarers of the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians colonised the Maltese archipelago around the 8th century BC, followed by the Carthaginians, heirs to their trading empire. With its anchorages and its strategic position in the middle of the Mediterranean, Gozo was one more stop on the routes linking East and West.
When Carthage fell, Malta and Gozo passed to Rome. The Romans called the island Gaulos or Gaudos (the source, over time, of its current name) and gave it a degree of autonomy as a municipium. Remains of villas survive from Roman times, and on the hill of today's Victoria stood the acropolis, the seed of the future Citadel. Christian tradition also places the shipwreck of St Paul in these waters, in AD 60; according to the Acts of the Apostles, he went on to convert the Maltese.
Gozo also has a place in the oldest Greek mythology. Since antiquity, many scholars have identified the island with Ogygia, home of the nymph Calypso in Homer's Odyssey: the island where the nymph, in love with the hero Ulysses (Odysseus), kept him for seven years, even offering him immortality. Above the red-sand beach of Ramla Bay, a cave is still pointed out today as the mythical Calypso's Cave. Real or legendary, this link with Homer wraps Gozo in a poetic aura that has fed travellers' imaginations for centuries.
In 870 the Arabs conquered Malta and Gozo, and their rule, which lasted more than two centuries, left a very deep mark, above all on the language: the Maltese spoken today is a Semitic language derived from Arabic (with heavy Italian influence later on), a case unique in Europe. Gozo's own Maltese name, Għawdex, comes from Arabic. Under the Arabs, irrigated farming and new crops took hold, along with many of the place names that still survive.
In 1127 the Normans, who already ruled Sicily, added the archipelago to their kingdom, and Gozo then passed, like Sicily, through Swabian, Angevin and Aragonese hands. Throughout the Middle Ages, life on the island was shaped by a constant threat: raids by Barbary and Ottoman pirates and corsairs, who swept the Mediterranean capturing people to sell as slaves. Small and exposed, Gozo was an easy target.
Faced with that danger, the old acropolis on the hill of Rabat (today's Victoria) became the Citadel, the fortified refuge for the whole island. For centuries a strict rule applied: every evening, by law, the entire population of Gozo had to withdraw to sleep inside the Citadel walls for safety, and could not return to their fields and villages until dawn. The Citadel was no defensive luxury, but the only guarantee of survival for a community living under the permanent threat of kidnapping and slavery.
Gozo's worst nightmare came true in July 1551. That summer, a large Ottoman force led by Admiral Sinan Pasha and the dreaded corsair Dragut (Turgut Reis), after a failed attempt to take Malta, fell on defenceless Gozo. The whole population, some five to six thousand people, took refuge as always inside the Citadel walls, trusting in their protection.
But the Citadel's medieval defences were no longer enough against Ottoman artillery. After a short siege, the fortress fell with little resistance. What followed was a catastrophe burned into Gozo's collective memory: the Ottomans captured practically the island's entire population — men, women and children — and shipped them off to be sold as slaves in the markets of Tripoli and North Africa. Only a handful of people, around three hundred, managed to escape by climbing down the walls at night or hiding. Gozo was, quite literally, emptied overnight.
The captivity of 1551 was one of the greatest disasters in Malta's history and a wound that took generations to heal. The island had to be slowly resettled over the following decades with settlers brought from Malta and Sicily. The trauma also led to stronger defences: the Knights of St John, who had ruled the archipelago since 1530, rebuilt the Citadel's southern walls between 1599 and 1603 with the powerful bastioned fortifications we admire today, so that such a tragedy would never happen again. That catastrophe explains why, even now, the Citadel dominates Gozo as its symbol most charged with history.
Under the rule of the Knights of St John (1530-1798), Gozo gradually recovered and was repopulated. The Citadel was strengthened, coastal watchtowers and batteries went up all over the island, and rural life flourished again around the villages and their churches. When Napoleon drove the Knights out of Malta in 1798, the Gozitans, quickly fed up with French rule, rose up remarkably fast and, with the help of a naval force, expelled the French garrison from Gozo in 1798 itself, even before Malta was rid of the French. For a short time, Gozo worked almost like a small independent state under the protection of Britain and the King of Sicily.
In 1800 the whole archipelago came into the orbit of the British Empire, which would govern Malta and Gozo for more than a century and a half. Under British administration, Gozo's capital, until then known simply as Rabat (Arabic for 'outskirts' or 'suburb', the town that grew at the foot of the Citadel), was given a new name. On 10 June 1887, to mark Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee — her fifty years on the throne — and at the request of the Bishop of Gozo, Mgr Pietro Pace, the town was granted city status and officially renamed Victoria, in honour of the queen.
The new name never fully caught on among Gozitans: many, especially older people, still call their capital Rabat, as they always have, and the two names sit side by side quite naturally on the island. That double name — Victoria for official purposes, Rabat for the heart — sums up Gozo's character: an island deeply attached to its traditions and identity, which absorbs changes of empire without giving up what is its own.
Malta gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1964, became a republic in 1974 and is today a member of the European Union (since 2004) and the eurozone (since 2008). All along that path, Gozo kept its own distinct personality. While the main island filled up with mass tourism, concrete and hurry, Gozo chose — partly by nature, partly by choice — a slower pace and a more human scale.
Today's Gozo is a deliberate contrast with its big sister: green fields edged with dry-stone walls, traditional villages dominated by monumental churches, coves of turquoise water, cliffs for hiking and a social life that still revolves around the parish, the festa and the family. Farming, fishing and wine sit alongside a slower, higher-quality kind of tourism that is looking for exactly that authenticity: restored farmhouses, agritourism, diving, walking. Gozitans are known for being warm, attached to their traditions and proud of their island.
From the Ġgantija temples, cradle of a civilisation five thousand years old, to the Citadel that sheltered an entire population from captivity; from the myth of Calypso to Queen Victoria's Jubilee; from the captivity of 1551 to the green calm of today: Gozo packs a very long history and a stubborn identity into a handful of kilometres. It is the oldest Malta and, at the same time, the most serene; the island in the heart of the Mediterranean that decided not to rush. That is why many travellers say that, of the whole archipelago, Gozo is what stays with them the most.
