Rich history of Valletta makes it a go-to spot for Hollywood’s finest

A view over Malta’s capital, Valletta. — A view over Malta’s capital, Valletta and Manoel Island.

The 16th-Century streets of Valletta glow golden in the late afternoon sunshine.

The only soundtrack is a background hum of tourists strolling past weathered mansions which once housed crusader knights, or relaxing with a drink outside one of the dozens of cafes.

It’s difficult to imagine vengeful dinosaurs rampaging through this historic city, but anyone who watched Jurassic World: Dominion will recognise St George’s Square as one of the locations where a pack of atrociraptors chased Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas-Howard along the streets and alleys of the Maltese capital.

Narrow Street with colourful balconies in historical part of Valletta.

And with parts of the newest movie in the franchise, Jurassic World: Rebirth, filmed on the island’s coast and at the studios in Kalkara, Malta is back on the big screen once again this summer. It’s all in a day’s work for Malta, though. This little island might be small – Malta, plus sister islands Gozo and Comino cover just 122 square miles combined, not much more than the Greater Glasgow area – but they’ve stood in for Jerusalem, Rome and Greece, and played host to gladiators and zombies as well as dinosaurs.

So while Malta might be best-known for its year-round sun, great diving and laid-back atmosphere, you don’t have to venture far to discover a scene you’ll recognise from the silver screen. In the north of the island, the colourful film set used for the 1980 Robin Williams film Popeye has even been turned into a fun park called Popeye Village, where you can pose with Olive Oyl and Bluto, before starring in your own short film.

Meanwhile, Valletta’s dinosaur-infested square is actually the site of the Grand Master’s Palace, once the lavish home of the commander of the Knights of St John, now a tourist attraction and the office of the president of Malta. A 10-minute walk away, passing houses with their traditional closed wooden balconies known as gallarija, is the star-shaped Fort St Elmo, housing the National War Museum and – briefly – where Brad Pitt fought off the zombie apocalypse in World War Z.

Across the water, the Colosseum was constructed not once but twice inside Fort Ricasoli for Gladiator and its recent sequel, and the entrance to an illegal dinosaur market was tucked away under the imposing Fort St Angelo in nearby Birgu.

Today, the closest you’ll get to dinosaurs is a visit to the island’s medieval capital, Mdina, where the collection of prehistoric fossils at the Malta Museum of Natural History includes a tooth of a Giant White Shark, Carcharocles megalodon, which lived around 23 million years ago. It’s not hard to believe you’ve stepped back into the past here though; instead of the revving of engines, you’ll hear the clop of hooves, as horses pull carriages for tourists through the pedestrianised streets. Wandering down quiet alleys, occasional decorative signs reading “the old Jewish silk market” and the “old Greek bordello” offer the visitor clues to what might once have been hidden behind the imposing wooden doors.

There’s an added bonus for Game of Thrones fans, who can pretend they’re exploring King’s Landing; the ornate main gate doubled as the entrance to the capital of Westeros in the first season of the show.

But while you’re not going to find prehistoric life roaming this Mediterranean island, you could hardly pick a better location for a slice of the ancient past. Home to the world’s second-oldest existing man-made religious structures, the temples at Ggantija on the sister island of Gozo date back more than 5,500 years. On Malta itself, the temples of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra are only slightly younger, still centuries older than the Great Pyramid at Giza and Stonehenge.

When I first visited Malta, there wasn’t much information for visitors, so beyond gazing at the ancient stones and marvelling at how long they’ve stood there, it remained a bit of an enigma. Since then, a new visitor centre has been built at Hagar Qim, with a 3D movie introducing you to the temple builders and the sites, as well as displays of artefacts found during excavations.

A highlight is the series of stone figures known as the “fat ladies”, including the Venus of Malta, although whether they’re fertility statues, goddesses or even female at all is up for debate.

Elsewhere, you might expect thousands of visitors at a site like this, especially at the equinoxes and solstices when light shines through a specially positioned opening to illuminate one area at Mnajdra. But if you walk to the remains of the temples to see the opening bored through the stone, you’ll have it almost to yourself.

Surrounded by fields of wildflowers, looking out on the gleaming blue Mediterranean below, much of it remains a mystery. Whoever the temple builders were, they came, they brought huge megaliths – one weighing 20 tonnes, another stretching more than 5m tall – to a string of sites and then they vanished, their civilisation lost and the temples themselves buried and forgotten for millennia.

With a history like that, who needs virtual dinosaurs to tempt you to visit?

P.S. If you think Malta’s only claim to fame is doubling for ancient cities or hosting rampaging dinosaurs, think again. Beneath the streets of Valletta lies a hidden world of tunnels and chambers carved out during the Second World War.

These secret shelters protected thousands from relentless bombing raids and some of the more atmospheric sites, like the Lascaris War Rooms, have even been used as film locations themselves – blending Malta’s real wartime history with its silver screen alter ego.

Factfile

There are regular direct flights from Edinburgh and Glasgow to Malta International Airport near Valletta, including routes with Ryanair, Jet2 and British Airways. For more information on Malta, including more filming locations on the islands, go to www.visitmalta.com