Things to Do in Valletta: A Historical Guide for Curious Travellers

Valletta rises from its harbour like an idea made permanent in honey-coloured limestone — a capital the Knights of St John built, deliberately, as a fortress worthy of the men who had just survived a four-month siege by the Ottoman Empire. Barely a kilometre wide, the old city holds a cathedral with two paintings by Caravaggio, a palace that has governed Malta continuously since the sixteenth century, and harbour views that have changed remarkably little in four hundred years. Odyssey Traveller’s 25-day Mediterranean Islands tour spends its opening days in Malta, with a full day given over to walking Valletta’s streets before the group moves on to Gozo, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. For travellers who want the city’s history explained rather than simply pointed at, this is where Malta’s story properly begins.

A Capital Built by the Knights of St John

Valletta did not grow up gradually, the way most old cities do — it was planned and built in a single sustained effort, and the reason was survival. In 1565, the Knights Hospitaller, an order of warrior-monks who had held Malta since 1530, endured a four-month siege by the forces of Suleiman the Magnificent. They held on, at brutal cost, and the Order’s Grand Master, Jean Parisot de la Valette, resolved that Malta would never again be caught defending itself from a makeshift position. The new capital, built on the Sciberras peninsula and named for him, was laid out on a grid within a ring of bastions thick enough to withstand artillery, its streets angled to funnel sea breezes through the summer heat.

The Knights ruled Malta as a sovereign order until 1798, when Napoleon’s fleet, en route to Egypt, took the island with barely a fight. For over two centuries before that, though, Valletta functioned as the Order’s headquarters, and its architecture still reflects that structure: each langue, or national grouping of knights — French, Italian, Castilian, and others — maintained its own auberge, or inn, several of which still stand along the city’s main streets.

Upper Barakka Gardens and the View the Knights Built

The best introduction to Valletta’s logic is not a building at all but a view. Upper Barakka Gardens sit on the bastions above the Grand Harbour, looking directly across the water to the Three Cities — Birgu, Senglea and Cospicua — which served as the Knights’ base before Valletta existed. The Saluting Battery below still fires a noon gun, a tradition carried over from the harbour’s working military past. From here, the scale of the fortifications becomes obvious: bastion after bastion, built to control every approach a hostile fleet might take.

St John’s Co-Cathedral: Valletta’s Baroque Masterpiece

From the outside, St John’s Co-Cathedral is almost severe — a fortress facade that gives no hint of what waits inside. The interior is one of the most extravagant Baroque spaces in Europe, its walls and vaulted ceiling carved and gilded almost without a bare surface, and its floor made entirely of inlaid marble tombstones marking the graves of knights from across the Order. The cathedral holds two works by Caravaggio, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and Saint Jerome Writing, painted during the artist’s brief and turbulent period as a knight himself in 1607–08, before a violent falling-out saw him flee the island. The Beheading remains the only painting Caravaggio ever signed.

The Grandmaster’s Palace: Malta’s Seat of Power for Five Centuries

Few buildings anywhere have stayed in continuous political use as long as the Grandmaster’s Palace. Built in the 1570s as the residence and administrative centre of the Knights’ Grand Masters, it later served as the seat of British colonial government after 1800, and today houses the office of the President of Malta, with the country’s Parliament close by. Inside, the State Rooms are hung with tapestries and frescoed with scenes from the Great Siege, while the Palace Armoury holds one of the largest surviving collections of Knights-era weapons and armour in the world — a reminder that Valletta’s beauty and its military purpose were never separate things.

Crossing the Harbour to the Three Cities

Valletta’s story is incomplete without a visit across the water to Birgu, also known as Vittoriosa, and its neighbours Senglea and Cospicua. This was the Knights’ original stronghold, anchored by Fort St Angelo, before Valletta was ever built — older, quieter, and in many ways more atmospheric, with narrow streets that have seen far less restoration than the capital itself. A traditional dghajsa water taxi across the harbour is still the most memorable way to make the crossing. Travellers planning a fuller route through Malta’s first days, including Mdina, Rabat and Gozo’s megalithic temples, may find it useful to read our Malta itinerary for mature travellers, which lays out how these sites fit together over five days.

Planning Your Visit to Valletta

Valletta rewards travellers who are comfortable on foot. The old city itself is compact and largely level within its grid of streets, though the approach from the harbour side involves a steady climb, and Maltese limestone paving can be uneven in places, so supportive shoes are worth the small effort. Many of the city’s finest interiors, including the cathedral and the Palace, are best appreciated slowly and with some guidance — a local guide will point out details, from carved coats of arms to worn tomb inscriptions, that are easy to miss without one. Spring and autumn keep the walking comfortable in Valletta just as they do further on in Sicily; our guide to the best time to visit Sicily covers the seasonal trade-offs across the wider tour in more detail. On Odyssey’s tour, Valletta is covered in a single, well-paced day that also takes in the Museum of Archaeology and an audio-visual introduction to the Great Siege, allowing the rest of the group’s time in Malta to focus on Gozo and the island’s older prehistoric sites. Solo travellers are a regular part of these small groups, which are capped at 6–14 people, keeping access to guides and sites unhurried.

Valletta is a city built with a single purpose in mind, and walking it today still carries something of that intent — every bastion, gate and vista placed there for a reason. Seeing it as part of a longer Mediterranean journey, alongside Sicily’s Greek ruins, Sardinia’s Bronze Age towers and Corsica’s mountain coast, puts Malta’s fortress capital into a wider story of the islands that once held the keys to this sea. Our complete Mediterranean Islands itinerary guide traces that full 25-day route from Malta through to Corsica.