St Julian's is the Malta that never sleeps. By day it's an elegant seaside town of jagged bays, fishing boats bobbing in Spinola Bay and restaurant terraces at the water's edge; by night it turns into the country's party capital, with Paceville —a handful of tight streets packed with bars, pubs and clubs— pulsing until dawn. Few places pack so much contrast into so little space.
The town has several hearts. Spinola Bay is the most photogenic: a horseshoe bay with colourful luzzus, the famous LOVE monument and a row of seafood restaurants with tables almost on the sea. Balluta Bay, towards Sliema, adds a small beach and the neo-Gothic Carmelite church. St George's Bay has the area's only sandy beach. And Paceville, on the point, is the kingdom of the night: clubs, casinos, cinemas and the luxury Portomaso complex with its tower and marina.
This guide shows you both sides of St Julian's: the romantic sunset at Spinola and the wild nights in Paceville. We tell you what to see by day, where to swim, how the nightlife works (and how to stay safe in it), what prices to expect and how to get around an island with no trains where people drive on the left. Ideal if you're after a comfortable base, good food by the sea and nights out without needing a taxi.
Until the 20th century, St Julian's was a quiet coastal corner of fishermen and farmers, and a hunting ground of the Knights of St John. Its historic landmark is the Spinola Palace, built in 1688 by the knight Fra Paolo Raffaele Spinola, Grand Prior of Lombardy, 'for the enjoyment of the people', and enlarged in 1733 by his nephew with baroque gardens; next to it, the chapel of the Immaculate Conception was built in 1687. The area takes its name from St Julian the Hospitaller, patron saint of hunters. With the tourism boom from the sixties onwards, that village on Spinola Bay became Malta's great hub of entertainment and nightlife, with Paceville at its heart. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Malta's urban and fishing coastline: from modern Sliema and the nightlife of St Julian's to the colourful boats of the village of Marsaxlokk.
Read the history of The coast (Sliema, Marsaxlokk) →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before the clubs of Paceville and the towers of Portomaso, St Julian's was for centuries an almost empty stretch of fields, scrubland and coves, visited only by a few fishermen and farmers. Its appeal was not urban but sporting: the area, covered in Mediterranean vegetation and full of game, was a favourite hunting ground of the Knights of the Order of St John. They came to these coastal hills to hunt birds and rabbits, the favourite sport and pastime of the aristocracy of the day.
The place takes its name from that pastime. A chapel was built here and dedicated to St Julian the Hospitaller, a medieval saint whom Christian tradition made the patron saint of hunters. According to legend, Julian accidentally killed his own parents during a hunt and atoned for it by devoting his life to sheltering and caring for travellers and the sick. The hunting knights entrusted the area to this saint, and so the spot came to be called San Ġiljan, St Julian's. Devotion to the hunter saint was fixed in the place name long before any village existed.
The original St Julian's was all silence, hills and sea: a hunting ground where you heard the knights' gunshots and the bells of a chapel, not the club music that would make it famous centuries later. The horseshoe-shaped Spinola Bay, now the heart of the tourist area, was back then just a sheltered anchorage for fishing boats.
The first great landmark built in St Julian's, and the one that gave its bay the name it still carries, was Spinola Palace. It was commissioned in 1688 by the Italian knight Fra Paolo Raffaele Spinola, Grand Prior of Lombardy of the Order of St John, as a country retreat beside the quiet fishing bay. A Latin inscription above the entrance declared that the palace and its gardens were built 'for the enjoyment of the people', and the place was indeed used for cultural events and celebrations. It also served as a summer residence for the Grand Masters of the Order, especially during the feast of Ta' Lapsi, the Ascension.
A year earlier, in 1687, Fra Paolo had a chapel dedicated to the Immaculate Conception built next to the palace, serving as the church of the estate. Decades later, in 1733, the founder's nephew, Fra Giovanni Battista Spinola, greatly enlarged and embellished the palace under the direction of Romano Fortunato Carapecchia, one of the great architects of the Maltese Baroque. The rear façade, with its elegant clock, is considered a masterpiece of the island's Baroque civil architecture, a rare feature in a secular building.
So the bay the Spinolas chose for their leisure was marked forever with their surname: Spinola Bay. Around the palace and its chapel, the seed of a settlement slowly took shape, still modest and tied to fishing and rural life. For the rest of the Knights' rule, then under the brief French occupation (1798-1800) and the long British rule that began in 1800, St Julian's remained a peaceful, sparsely built corner, a world away from today's bustle.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, with Malta now a key naval base of the British Empire, St Julian's began to grow and organise itself as a community. It was still a seaside village of Latin architecture, with Spinola Palace and its green surroundings as its landmark, and its people lived from fishing and farming. Spinola Bay filled with luzzus, the colourful fishing boats with eyes painted on the bow (a Phoenician legacy said to protect sailors), which are still its signature image today.
In that period, a more genteel St Julian's left some elegant traces, such as the Balluta Buildings, a group of Art Nouveau buildings facing Balluta Bay, and the striking neo-Gothic Carmelite church, whose European-cathedral silhouette comes as a surprise in a Mediterranean landscape. Being close to Sliema, the fashionable resort of Valletta's middle classes, also drew St Julian's towards a future of summer holidays and seaside leisure.
Like the rest of Malta, St Julian's lived through the trauma of the Second World War, when the island, a British base, was one of the most heavily bombed places of the conflict between 1940 and 1943. Afterwards it shared the country's path to independence from the United Kingdom in 1964, becoming a republic in 1974 and seeing the British troops leave in 1979. But the big turning point for St Julian's would come not from politics but from tourism.
St Julian's went from fishing village to Malta's leisure capital in the second half of the 20th century, driven by international tourism. As Malta opened up to mass tourism from the sixties onwards, the coast between Sliema and St Julian's filled with hotels, and the upper part of town, a headland called Paceville, began to gather the nightlife: first bars and dance halls, then clubs, casinos, cinemas and entertainment complexes.
Over time, Paceville became the undisputed centre of the country's nightlife: a few tight streets packed with around forty bars, pubs and clubs, plus casinos, a large cinema, a bowling alley, fast-food spots and an artificial beach at St George's Bay. The crowd, mostly young and very international (boosted by the many English-language schools that draw students from all over Europe), turned Paceville into a byword for partying in the Mediterranean, with superclubs, rooftops and pool parties.
That growth had its downside too. Property pressure radically transformed St Julian's: towers of hotels and apartments went up, and from the nineties and 2000s Portomaso was built, a luxury complex around an artificial marina crowned by the Portomaso Business Tower, for years the tallest building in Malta. The contrast could not be greater: just metres apart, Paceville's teenage buzz sits next to the quiet luxury of the yachts at Portomaso. Debate over overcrowding, noise and building heights has followed the town ever since.
21st-century St Julian's is really two towns layered on top of each other. There is postcard St Julian's: Spinola Bay with its colourful luzzus, seafood restaurant terraces almost on the water, the LOVE monument, the neo-Gothic church at Balluta, Spinola Palace and its gardens, the golden sunset over the boats. This is the romantic, Mediterranean side, the one that recalls the old fishing and hunting village.
And there is night-time St Julian's: Paceville buzzing until dawn, the casinos at Portomaso and Dragonara, the town beach at St George's, the luxury towers and the yacht marina. This is the modern, cosmopolitan and noisy side, the country's main engine of tourism and leisure, together with neighbouring Sliema, with which it forms one continuous built-up area linked by the seafront promenade.
From the knights' hunting ground to Malta's party capital: few places have changed so much, so fast. St Julian's lost much of its calm and its heritage to the push of tourism and concrete, but in Spinola Bay and Spinola Palace it keeps the memory of what it once was. Today it is a comfortable, lively base for exploring Malta: seafront meals by day, music all night, and a short walk away, the ferry to Valletta and boat trips to the turquoise waters of Comino and Gozo.
