Valletta is a city built on purpose, all at once and with one goal: never to be left defenceless again. After the Great Siege of 1565, when the Knights of the Order of St John and the Maltese people held out for almost four months against the Ottoman Empire, Grand Master Jean de Valette decided to raise a brand-new fortress city on the barren Mount Sciberras peninsula, between the two harbours. Within a few decades one of Europe's first planned cities was born: a grid layout, colossal walls, churches, palaces and the Order's inns (auberges), all in the same golden limestone that glows like gold at sunset.
The result is a miniature Baroque capital, dense and intense, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in its entirety. Within just a few blocks you'll find the dazzling St John's Co-Cathedral, with its floor of marble tombstones and two Caravaggio masterpieces, the palace where the grand masters ruled, museums, underground Second World War shelters and painted wooden balconies overlooking steep streets that tumble down to the sea. From the Upper Barrakka Gardens, the view of the Grand Harbour and the fortified Three Cities opposite is one of the most impressive in the Mediterranean.
This guide explores Valletta with a practical, friendly eye: what to see without missing the essentials, how to get into the Co-Cathedral and the museums, how to make the most of the viewpoints and the cannon salute, where to enjoy a good pastizzi or Maltese-style rabbit, and how to use the city as a base to discover the rest of Malta. Small, walkable and steeped in history, Valletta rewards travellers who take the time to wander its stairways and peek around every corner with a view of the water.
Valletta was born of war. When Emperor Charles V granted Malta to the Order of St John of Jerusalem in 1530 (the Knights Hospitaller, driven out of Rhodes), the island had no major city. Everything changed with the Great Siege of 1565: between May and September, a few thousand knights and Maltese, led by the elderly Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette, withstood the assault of a huge Ottoman fleet and army sent by Suleiman the Magnificent. The Christian victory echoed across Europe and made Malta a symbol of resistance. To shield the island, De Valette founded a new city in 1566 on the Mount Sciberras peninsula, between the Grand Harbour and Marsamxett, which would bear his name. Designed by the military engineer Francesco Laparelli and continued by the Maltese Girolamo Cassar, it rose within a few decades with enormous walls, a regular grid and Baroque buildings. For more than two centuries it was the capital of the Knights, until Napoleon took Malta in 1798. British rule followed soon after (1800-1964), under which Valletta was a key naval base; in the Second World War, Malta endured one of the most intense bombing campaigns in history and the whole island was awarded the George Cross. Independent since 1964 and a republic since 1974, Valletta today is the capital of a European Union member state and a Baroque gem cared for as a World Heritage Site. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The fortified heart of Malta: the Baroque capital built after the Great Siege and the Three Cities of the knights, all looking out over the Grand Harbour.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The story of Valletta begins with an order of knights who had no land. The Knights of St John of Jerusalem, also called the Hospitallers, were founded in the 11th century to care for Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. Over time they became a military and religious order that fought in the Crusades. When the last Christian strongholds in the East fell, they withdrew to Cyprus and then to the island of Rhodes in the Aegean. For two centuries they were a naval power there, harassing the Ottoman Turks. In 1522, after a brutal siege, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent drove them out of Rhodes.
For eight years the Order wandered around Europe with no home. Then in 1530 Emperor Charles V, King of Spain and lord of Sicily, granted them the Maltese archipelago as a fief. The symbolic rent was a colourful one: a Maltese falcon, to be handed over every year to the Viceroy of Sicily (hence the legend of the 'Maltese falcon'). In return, the knights had to defend the central Mediterranean against the Ottoman advance and the Barbary corsairs.
Malta was no coveted prize. It was a dry island with no rivers, few trees and little water, home to a few thousand farmers and fishermen who spoke a Semitic language. The knights were used to fertile Rhodes and settled there reluctantly. They chose Birgu (later Vittoriosa), beside the Grand Harbour, and fortified that strip of land. It soon became clear that this small rock in the middle of the sea was a strategic position of the first order, and that a famous battle would decide who held it.
In the spring of 1565 the Ottoman Empire launched one of the largest military operations of its time against Malta. Suleiman the Magnificent, the most powerful sultan of the age, sent a fleet of more than 180 ships. Sources put his army at around 30,000 to 40,000 men. Their task was to take the island from the knights and use it as a springboard to attack Sicily, Italy and the western Mediterranean. Against them stood Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette, a veteran in his seventies. He had only about 500 knights and a few thousand Maltese soldiers and militiamen, perhaps 6,000 to 8,000 defenders in all.
The siege lasted from May to September and was extremely fierce. The Ottomans first turned their guns on the small Fort St Elmo, at the tip of the peninsula where Valletta stands today. Against all odds, St Elmo held out for almost a month under constant bombardment before it fell, with nearly all its defenders dead. That resistance drained the attackers and cost them precious time. According to tradition, the Ottoman commander Mustafa Pasha saw the price of taking that minor fort and asked in despair how much the main citadel would cost, then.
The assault then moved to Birgu and Senglea, where the knights and the Maltese people fought house by house. There was cruelty on both sides, with beheadings and bodies used to send a message. Women, the elderly and children all took part in a desperate defence. When all seemed lost, the Great Relief finally arrived in early September: a relief force sent from Sicily by the Spanish viceroy. Exhausted and badly depleted, the Ottomans lifted the siege and withdrew. All of Europe hailed the Christian victory as a miracle. It saved Malta and halted the Ottoman advance westwards.
The Great Siege taught a clear lesson. If the knights wanted to survive the next attack, they needed a modern fortress on the commanding position of the Mount Sciberras peninsula. This strip of land lies between the Grand Harbour and Marsamxett Harbour, and the Ottomans had bombarded the defenders from there. On 28 March 1566, barely six months after the victory, Grand Master Jean de Valette laid the first stone of a brand-new city that would bear his name: Valletta.
The project was a feat of engineering and town planning. The Order hired the Italian military engineer Francesco Laparelli, sent by Pope Pius V. He drew up a plan that was revolutionary for its time: a regular grid of straight streets meeting at right angles, designed for both traffic and defence. Around it ran a belt of walls, bastions and ditches cut into the bedrock. It was one of the first European cities planned entirely from scratch on the principles of Renaissance town planning and modern fortification. After Laparelli left, the work was carried on by his Maltese assistant, the architect Girolamo Cassar, who designed many of the city's landmark buildings.
Thousands of workers and slaves built the city at an astonishing pace. Within a few years the walls were up, along with St John's Co-Cathedral, the Grand Master's Palace, the auberges of the Order's different 'langues' (nations) and a hospital. That hospital, the Sacra Infermeria, was famous for its huge ward and for care that was advanced for its time. Valletta thus became the Order's new capital and its pride: a Baroque city of golden stone, designed both as a military bastion and as a showcase for the knights' power and faith. Jean de Valette died in 1568 and was buried in the city he had dreamed of, without ever seeing it finished.
In the 17th and 18th centuries Valletta was at its height, the capital of a prosperous, cosmopolitan state ruled by the Order. The knights came from noble families all over Catholic Europe, and they made Malta a crossroads of the Mediterranean. It was the base of a fleet that fought the corsairs, a haven for trade and an artistic centre where Italian, French and Spanish influences met. The wealth they gathered went into decorating the city in the lavish language of the Baroque.
The symbol of that splendour is St John's Co-Cathedral. From the outside it is plain, almost a fortress. Inside, it bursts with gold, coloured marble and painting. Grand Master Rafael Cotoner commissioned the Calabrian painter Mattia Preti to decorate the vault with scenes from the life of St John the Baptist, and each 'langue' of the Order competed to make its chapel the most magnificent. The floor is a mosaic of nearly four hundred marble tombstones, with knights buried beneath them. And in the oratory hangs the absolute jewel: 'The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist' by Caravaggio, the only work the Italian genius ever signed. He painted it while living in Malta as a knight, shortly before he fled the island after a violent incident.
The Order also left a scientific and humanitarian mark. The Sacra Infermeria was one of the most advanced hospitals in Europe, where the sick, including pilgrims and slaves, were served on silver plates. A university was founded, libraries, theatres and palaces were built, and Valletta filled up with fountains, churches and gardens. Yet that brilliant world rested on an economy that included privateering and slavery, and on an aristocracy that slowly lost its founders' fighting spirit over the generations. By the late 18th century the Order was in decline, weakened by the loss of its income in revolutionary Europe.
The Order's rule in Malta ended suddenly. In June 1798, on his way to the Egyptian campaign, Napoleon Bonaparte appeared off Valletta with his fleet and demanded surrender. Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch had no will to resist and led a divided, declining Order, so he handed over the island almost without a fight. Within days the French had looted churches and treasures, including much of the Order's silver, and abolished the old regime. But the looting and the anticlerical reforms enraged the Maltese. They rose up against the French garrison and besieged it inside the walls of Valletta.
The Maltese asked Britain for help, and its fleet blockaded the harbour. In 1800 the starving French surrendered and Malta came under British protection. The Treaty of Paris of 1814 made this permanent, and the island became a Crown colony. For the British Empire, Malta was a strategic jewel. Its deep, sheltered Grand Harbour became one of the main naval bases in the Mediterranean and a key stop on the route to India. After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, it became vital to imperial trade and power.
British rule lasted a century and a half, and Valletta remained the capital and administrative centre. The city was modernised with new public works, dockyards and fortifications were built, and a Maltese identity grew that blended a Catholic, Latin heritage with the English language and British institutions. Maltese and English came to be spoken side by side, and the country adopted driving on the left, a legacy that remains today. In the early 20th century a self-government movement also began to grow, demanding that the Maltese have more say in their island's future.
The 20th century put Valletta and all of Malta in the front line. During World War II the island lay halfway between Europe and Africa, next to the Axis supply routes to North Africa, and that made it a top-priority target. Between 1940 and 1942 the German and Italian air forces subjected Malta to one of the most intense and sustained bombing campaigns in history. Thousands of air raids dropped an enormous tonnage of bombs on a tiny island. They flattened parts of Valletta, the dockyards and the Three Cities, and forced people to shelter in tunnels and shelters cut into the rock.
Malta held out on the brink of famine. Its people and garrison depended on convoys that crossed a sea controlled by the enemy. The most famous was Operation Pedestal in August 1942, when a badly battered convoy brought in the supplies and fuel that saved the island from surrender. In April 1942 King George VI awarded the whole island the George Cross, Britain's highest civilian award for bravery, in recognition of the Maltese people's courage under fire. It was an unprecedented honour for an entire people, and the cross appears on Malta's flag today. The air defence was directed from the Lascaris War Rooms, dug beneath Valletta, and in 1943 they helped plan the Allied landings in Sicily.
After the war, the drive for self-government picked up speed. Malta became independent within the Commonwealth in 1964 and declared itself a republic in 1974. The last British forces left in 1979. In 2004 the country joined the European Union, and in 2008 it adopted the euro. UNESCO listed Valletta as a World Heritage Site in 1980, and the city has since been restored and revived, with landmarks such as the new Parliament and the redesigned City Gate by Renzo Piano. In 2018 it was European Capital of Culture. Today the fortress city built after the Great Siege still stands, golden and full of life, as the capital of a Mediterranean republic and one of the best-preserved Baroque ensembles in the world.
