Sliema is the modern, cosmopolitan face of Malta: a long seafront promenade where locals and visitors walk, jog and have coffee looking out to sea, flat rock platforms for jumping into turquoise water and, across the way, the golden silhouette of walled Valletta rising over the harbour. What was a quiet fishing village a century and a half ago is today the liveliest, most commercial and most built-up district in the country, right next to the nightlife of St Julian's.
Don't expect the medieval charm of Mdina or the baroque of the capital from Sliema: here the present rules, with apartment towers, shopping centres like The Point in Tigné, international brands and restaurants of every kind. Its big appeal is practical and sensory: the best view of Valletta from the opposite shore (especially at sunset and at night, when the capital lights up), swimming off its rock platforms and the convenience of having transport, the ferry and excursions close at hand.
This guide takes Sliema for what it does best: the ideal base for getting to know Malta. We tell you how to cross to Valletta by ferry, where to swim, what to see along the promenade, how the boats to Comino's Blue Lagoon and Gozo leave from here, and how to get around an island with no trains where, on top of that, traffic drives on the left. Sliema doesn't dazzle with monuments, but it's the most convenient starting point for everything else.
Sliema owes its name to an old chapel dedicated to the Virgin as Star of the Sea (Stella Maris), which served as a beacon and landmark for the few fishermen who lived on this point, then known as il-Qortin. During the Great Siege of 1565, the area was the camp of Dragut's Ottoman troops; Dragut himself died nearby from fire from Fort St Elmo. The Knights of St John built Fort Tigné between 1793 and 1795, and the British expanded it along with several coastal batteries in the 19th century. With the opening of the Stella Maris church in 1855, the village grew into the favourite summer retreat of well-off Valletta residents, and in the 20th century into the modern, densely built town of today. 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.
It's hard to picture today, walking among apartment towers and shopping malls, but for centuries the peninsula where Sliema stands was an almost uninhabited wasteland, battered by wind and sea. It was known as il-Qortin, a Maltese place name for a barren, rocky plateau. There was no town or hamlet: only poor fields, quarries, the odd watchtower and a handful of fishermen working the waters of Marsamxett Harbour, opposite what would become Valletta.
On that bare headland stood a modest chapel dedicated to the Virgin under the title of Stella Maris, 'Star of the Sea', patron of sailors. The chapel served as a spiritual beacon and a visual landmark for fishermen heading out to sea and coming back: it was the point they looked for to find their bearings. Over time, the place took its name from that Marian title, which spoke of calm and protection: Sliema, a Maltese word related to the idea of 'peace', 'tranquillity' and 'health', and to the greeting of welcome.
The early Sliema, then, was sea and prayer: a coast of fishermen who entrusted themselves to a star. Nothing suggested that this forgotten outskirt would end up as the most modern, dense and cosmopolitan town in the whole Maltese archipelago. The transformation would take centuries to arrive, and it would come, first of all, through war.
The most dramatic historical episode linked to this coast took place in 1565, during the Great Siege of Malta, one of the decisive clashes between the Ottoman Empire and Christendom in the Mediterranean. That summer, a huge Ottoman fleet and army, sent by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, landed on the island with the aim of crushing the Knights of St John (the Knights of Malta) and seizing the island as a springboard into Europe. The defenders were few: a few hundred knights and a few thousand soldiers and Maltese, against tens of thousands of attackers.
The headland of il-Qortin, the future Sliema, became an Ottoman camp. From these heights above Marsamxett Harbour, Turkish batteries under the command of the feared corsair Dragut (Turgut Reis) pounded Fort St Elmo, which stood on the opposite point and whose capture was key to the siege. St Elmo held out for weeks with a heroism that became legendary, and its last-ditch defence bled the attackers and cost them precious time.
It was right here, on this coast, that Dragut met his death. While directing fire against St Elmo, a cannonball fired from the fort (according to tradition, a ricocheting stone splinter) wounded him fatally in the head. The death of one of the best Ottoman strategists was a huge blow to the besiegers' morale. The Great Siege ended in September 1565 with the Ottoman withdrawal and victory for the Knights, an event celebrated across Europe that established Malta as a Christian bastion. The Sliema headland, the setting for that drama, then fell back into its silence as a coastal wasteland.
After the Great Siege, the Knights of St John fortified the archipelago more and more. The Sliema headland, which commanded the entrance to Marsamxett Harbour, was too strategic to leave undefended. At the end of the 18th century, between 1793 and 1795, the Order built Fort Tigné there, a polygonal artillery fort (a modern design for its time) meant to protect the harbour and pound any enemy fleet that tried to approach. It was one of the Knights' last major military works in Malta, as in 1798 the Order was expelled by Napoleon, who took the island on his way to Egypt.
French rule did not last long: in 1800, with British help, the Maltese drove out the French, and Malta passed into the orbit of the British Empire, which turned it into one of its great naval bases in the Mediterranean. The British quickly grasped the military value of the Sliema peninsula and filled it with fortifications throughout the 19th century. They enlarged and modernised Fort Tigné and built a belt of coastal batteries: Sliema Point Battery (1872-1876), Cambridge Battery (1878-1886) and Garden Battery (1889-1894), designed to defend the harbour approach with the artillery of the industrial age.
The curious Il-Fortizza also dates from this period: a neo-medieval-looking building with battlements and turrets, put up by the British around 1880 on Tower Road (now a restaurant). And in 1881 the island's first seawater distillation plant was set up on the coast to supply the British barracks. Little by little, Sliema began to fill up: first with soldiers and military structures, and very soon with families too.
Sliema's real birth as a town came in the mid-19th century. The milestone was a religious one: in 1855 a new church dedicated to Our Lady Star of the Sea (Stella Maris) opened for worship, heir to the old chapel that had given the place its name. Around the church, the small fishing village began to grow and organise itself as a community, with its own streets, houses and parish.
What really set off its growth was the fashion for summer holidays. In the second half of the 19th century, well-off families from Valletta and the Three Cities discovered Sliema as a summer retreat: it lay opposite the capital, a short boat ride away, had clean open-sea air and room to build. Elegant Victorian-style summer houses with gardens and galleries began to go up, and along the coast came villas, hotels and the distinctive enclosed wooden balconies (gallariji) that are an emblem of Maltese architecture. Sliema became the island's chic seaside resort, where Valletta's middle class spent the summer.
The calm seawater along the coast, with its rock shelves, was ideal for bathing, and rectangular pools were even carved into the stone (the misnamed Roman Baths, which have nothing Roman about them, as they date from the late 19th century) for more sheltered swimming. By the early 20th century, Sliema was a fully fledged town, with trams, shops and a social life of its own, very different from the deserted headland it had been just a few decades earlier.
The 20th century put Sliema to the test, like the rest of Malta. During the Second World War, the island, a key base for the British fleet in the Mediterranean, suffered one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the conflict: between 1940 and 1943, Italian and German aircraft dropped thousands of tonnes of bombs on its harbours and towns. Sliema, right next to Marsamxett Harbour and the military targets, took its share of destruction, and many families sheltered in tunnels and shelters dug into the rock. The resilience of the Maltese people during that air siege earned the whole island the George Cross, the highest British civilian decoration, in 1942.
After the war came decolonisation. Malta gained independence from the United Kingdom on 21 September 1964, became a republic in 1974 and saw the last British garrison leave in 1979. Sliema, like the rest of the country, entered a new era: that of international tourism and property development. From the 1960s and 70s onwards, and more strongly in recent decades, the town went through a construction boom that changed its appearance completely.
That Victorian charm was gradually lost to the wrecking ball: the grand townhouses and garden villas lining Tower Road were demolished one after another and replaced by ever taller apartment blocks. The former military area of Tigné Point was turned into a modern development of residential towers, offices and The Point shopping centre. Sliema lost much of its historic heritage, something many Maltese regret, but it gained density, services and urban life.
21st-century Sliema is the most modern, populous and cosmopolitan town in the Maltese archipelago, and the country's main tourist and commercial hub together with neighbouring St Julian's. Its long seafront promenade, which runs around the peninsula from the ferry landing to Tower Road and on towards St Julian's, is the everyday stage for outdoor life: people walking, jogging, taking the dog out or having a coffee by the sea, with golden Valletta outlined on the opposite shore.
It's a town of contrasts. Alongside the glass towers of Tigné and the shopping malls, the old Stella Maris church survives, along with the odd wooden balcony, the remains of Il-Fortizza and the British batteries, and the same old ferry crossing the harbour in five minutes, just as it did a century ago. Sliema doesn't have the historical weight of Valletta or the medieval silence of Mdina, and anyone looking for monuments will have to go elsewhere; but as a base for exploring Malta it's hard to beat, thanks to its connections, its range of hotels for every budget and its location.
From that deserted il-Qortin where fishermen prayed to the Star of the Sea, Sliema became, in less than two centuries, the modern heart of Malta. Its history (Ottoman battlefield, belt of British forts, Victorian seaside resort and today a coastal city of concrete and glass) sums up, in miniature, that of the whole island: a crossroads of empires, seas and cultures in the middle of the Mediterranean. And its name, which means peace, still promises what those sailors were looking for: a refuge by the sea.
