Right next to aristocratic Mdina, and often overshadowed by it, Rabat hides some of Malta's most unusual treasures: not in its streets, but beneath them. This town in the centre of the island, whose Arabic name means 'suburb', was the outskirts of the ancient Roman city of Melite, and its subsoil is riddled with kilometres of early Christian burial galleries —the catacombs of St Paul and St Agatha—, with the grotto where, according to tradition, the apostle Paul took refuge after his shipwreck, and with the foundations of luxurious Roman villas with mosaics. Rabat is the Malta you have to look down to discover.
But Rabat is not just an archaeological site. It is also a living, authentic Maltese town, with its square, its churches, its pastizzerias where you can buy the best little pastries on the island, and a neighbourhood atmosphere that contrasts with the museum-like silence of Mdina. Here you can feel Maltese popular faith, closely tied to the figure of St Paul, the island's spiritual patron, whose presence is felt in the church that bears his name, in the grotto and in the patron saint festivities. It's a place to combine great history with everyday life.
This guide explores Rabat with a practical, warm eye: how to get there and pair it with Mdina and Dingli, which catacombs and museums not to miss, how to understand the link with St Paul and the first Christians, where to eat a freshly made pastizzi and how to use its underground attractions to escape the heat. Low-key but steeped in history, Rabat rewards the curious traveller who wants to go beyond the Mdina postcard and discover Malta's oldest and deepest roots.
Rabat began as the suburb of the ancient city. In Phoenician, Punic and Roman times, the great city of Melite —Malta's capital— covered both present-day Mdina and much of what is now Rabat, which lay inside or next to its walls. The mosaics and remains of the Domus Romana, a luxurious villa from around the turn of the era, bear witness to that period. According to Christian tradition, around AD 60 the apostle St Paul was shipwrecked on Malta and is said to have taken refuge in a grotto in Rabat (St Paul's Grotto), from where he preached and laid the foundations of Christianity on the island. In the first centuries AD, the Christian, Jewish and pagan communities of Melite carved vast underground necropolises into the soft rock beneath Rabat: the catacombs of St Paul and St Agatha, among the most important in the central Mediterranean. When the Arab conquest of the 9th century reduced the city to its walled core (Mdina), the rest was left as a suburb and given the name Rabat ('suburb' in Arabic). Throughout the Middle Ages and the era of the Order of St John, Rabat grew as a town linked to Mdina, with churches, convents and a strong devotion to St Paul. In the 17th century, Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt sponsored the church and the complex built over the grotto. Today Rabat keeps its authentic atmosphere and its extraordinary underground heritage. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Malta's ancient interior: the old medieval capital of Mdina, Rabat with its early Christian catacombs, and the temples and cliffs at the heart of the island.
Read the history of The historic centre (Mdina, Rabat) →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 6 activities in Mdina. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Rabat, you first have to picture a city that no longer exists in that form: Melite, the great capital of ancient Malta. In Phoenician, Punic and above all Roman times, Melite filled a walled area much larger than today's Mdina and covered a good part of what is now Rabat. In other words, Rabat and Mdina were originally one and the same city: the political and economic heart of the island, set inland on the highest and most defensible plateau, far from raids along the coast.
Roman Melite was a prosperous city, with forums, temples, walls and richly decorated aristocratic homes. The best evidence of that wealth is the Domus Romana, a luxurious house from around the turn of the era, discovered on the boundary between Mdina and Rabat. Its mosaics are among the finest in the western Mediterranean, with geometric patterns and the famous scene of the doves, and they reveal the Hellenistic taste and the wealth of the local elite. Malta was in Rome's orbit from 218 BC and served as a trading and strategic outpost on the routes of the central Mediterranean.
It was in this Roman Melite that the episode that would shape the identity of Rabat and the whole island forever took place: the shipwreck of St Paul. According to the Acts of the Apostles, around AD 60 the apostle, a prisoner on his way to Rome, was shipwrecked off Malta and stayed on the island for three months. Tradition places his refuge in a grotto in Rabat, from which he is said to have preached Christianity. It also tells of his meeting with Publius, the chief man of Melite, whom he converted and who would be venerated as Malta's first bishop. That shipwreck made Malta one of the earliest Christian communities in the world, and Rabat one of its holy places.
Ancient Rabat's most remarkable legacy lies underground. Between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, the people of Melite dug huge underground burial grounds, the catacombs, into the limestone beneath Rabat. They form one of the most important groups of early Christian cemeteries outside Rome and are the clearest evidence of early Christianity in the central Mediterranean. Roman law banned burials inside cities, so the dead were taken outside the walls, and Rabat's soft, easily carved rock lent itself to digging out passages and burial chambers.
The two main complexes are St Paul's Catacombs and St Agatha's Catacombs, but many smaller hypogea are scattered around the area. They are true cities of the dead: kilometres of hand-cut passages, chambers and tombs of different kinds, including niches, sarcophagi and 'canopied' tombs. A very distinctive feature is the agape tables, round ritual tables carved out of the rock. Families gathered around them for funeral banquets in memory of the dead, a custom that blended pagan and Christian traditions.
One fascinating thing about these catacombs is that Christian, Jewish and pagan burials sat side by side, sometimes in the same complex, each with the symbols of its own religion (the Jewish menorah, Christian symbols). This points to an ancient Malta that was diverse and tolerant in death, where several religious communities shared the same ground beneath the town. Although they bear saints' names, the catacombs have no direct link to those saints: the dedications are later devotional ones. St Agatha's also preserves valuable medieval frescoes in its crypt, with layer upon layer of worship built up over the centuries.
Rabat's layout and name, like Mdina's, took shape with the Arab conquest. Around AD 870 Muslim forces took Malta, and under their rule the old Melite was reorganised. The Arabs decided to shrink the city down to its highest and most defensible core, which they enclosed with new walls and cut off with a ditch. That core became known as Mdina, from the Arabic 'medina', 'the city'. The rest of the old urban area, left outside the new walls, became the outskirts or suburb, and it took the name it still has today: Rabat, which in Arabic means precisely 'suburb'.
So a planning decision made more than a thousand years ago split the old capital in two and created the relationship that lasts to this day: Mdina, the walled city inside; Rabat, the suburb outside. The great early Christian underground cemeteries, which in Roman times lay outside Melite's walls, now fell within Rabat. That explains why the island's main catacombs are found right here.
Throughout the Arab period, which lasted until the Norman conquest of 1091, the area kept its population and activity, and that era left a deep mark. Besides the names Mdina and Rabat, the Arabic brought in at the time is the origin of the Maltese language, which is still spoken today. Interestingly, at the Domus Romana archaeologists found Muslim graves dug on top of the remains of the Roman house. This shows that the area was still used as a cemetery in the Islamic period too, with cultures and beliefs layered on the same ground.
Throughout the Middle Ages, while Mdina was the aristocratic capital, Rabat grew as a town closely tied to it, with its own religious and community life. Devotion to St Paul, the spiritual father of Maltese Christianity, gave Rabat a central place in the island's faith. St Paul's Grotto and the sites linked to his stay became places of pilgrimage, and chapels, churches and friaries went up around them. Religious orders such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and Capuchins settled in Rabat, which filled up with churches.
With the arrival of the Order of St John in 1530, and above all after the founding of Valletta, the Mdina and Rabat area was pushed aside from political power, but it kept its religious prestige. In the 17th century the French Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt, the same man who gave Malta its aqueducts and fortifications, backed the building of the great religious complex over St Paul's Grotto: St Paul's Church, the grotto fitted out as a shrine, and a college for the Order's chaplains, which now houses the Wignacourt Museum. That patronage cemented Rabat's place as the island's main centre of devotion to St Paul.
Life in Rabat kept revolving around its churches, its patron saints' festas and its role as a farming and craft town in the interior. Popular religion, so typical of Malta, found one of its most intense centres here, with processions, confraternities and, every 10 February, the commemoration of St Paul's shipwreck. This national holiday recalls how Maltese Christianity began on this very ground.
Today's Rabat is a living Maltese town that carries on its shoulders, and under its streets, a heritage almost three thousand years old. During the Second World War, when Malta suffered one of the most intense bombing campaigns in history, Rabat's residents took shelter in the same ground their ancestors had tunnelled into. Tunnels and passages were dug or reused as air-raid shelters. Some of them, such as the ones you can visit from the Wignacourt Museum, survive today alongside the catacombs and the grotto, layering 20th-century war on top of 1st-century Rome.
In modern, independent Malta, Rabat has kept its character without turning into a stage set. It is still a town of locals, with its Saqqajja square, its churches, its loud and colourful festas, and its famous pastizzerias, which bake some of the best pastizzi on the island: the small flaky pastries that are almost a national emblem. That contrast between historic solemnity and everyday life is part of its charm. You can go from exploring a sixteen-century-old catacomb to eating a hot pastizz in the street in a matter of minutes.
Run by Heritage Malta and by religious foundations, St Paul's and St Agatha's Catacombs, the Domus Romana and the Wignacourt Museum make Rabat, together with neighbouring Mdina, the main hub for heritage tourism in inland Malta. Less photogenic than the 'silent city' but deeper in its legacy, Rabat rewards anyone who stops to look down and discovers that much of Malta's oldest history (Roman, early Christian, St Paul's) is still here, hidden beneath an ordinary town in the middle of the island.
