What I visited in Malta in 7 days

Hi all,

Today I am going to tell you what I visited in the 7 days of vacation I was in Malta and my opinion about each site.

These were the visits we made:

Golden Bay, Riviera beach (Ghajn Tuffieha), Qarraba bay, Il-Ġnejna
Valletta, Pembroke beach
Coral Lagoon, Sliema (Knisja tal-Karmnu)
Gozo
Mdina, Mosta, Il Birgu
St. Peter’s Pool
Dingli Cliffs, Blue Grotto

When we planned the trip to Malta, we saw that public transport was cheap and seemed to work very well, so we did not rent a car to explore the island.

The first day we took the bus that dropped us off at Golden Bay beach, which according to what we had read in the reviews, was the most spectacular on the island. When you get off the bus you find firstly rubbish everywhere and then many ugly and decaying buildings.

The Golden Bay beach has several hotels right behind it, restaurants and bars. We arrived before 9am and it was already full of locals. For me the beach was horrible because of how massive it was, the garbage and that all the sand was covered with cigarette butts. So, as we arrived, we left.

We climbed the mountain and began to make our trekking route to visit the rest of the beaches. Here Diego told me that I was very negative and that the beaches weren’t so bad. His optimism ran out quickly because that same day we got to know the real Malta.

There was an inclement sun and I felt like dying, that weather was not what I expected in September.

We found some natural pools in which we thought there was no one; Besides, it was the only part where the water was crystal clear. We went snorkelling and Diego saw an octopus. As where we were there was no shade at all, I went walking to see where we could get shade and Diego went swimming.

I saw a kind of tents made with sheets and things started to get strange. When I met Diego, he told me that he had seen two naked bodies “doing things.”

We moved to where we had a bit of shade and we realized that those natural pools were the meeting place for homosexual men and in fact they were all the time watching us as they were waiting in case Diego wanted to experiment.

We continued our way with that horrible heat to the last beach that was the most massive of all. There they put the cars to the edge of the beach. We bathed for a while, ate the last remaining fruit, and went to the bus stop.

After half an hour of waiting, we realized that the bus service had been cancelled just that day. When we were leaving, a shuttle arrived and left us in another town where we had to take the only bus available that left us in Mosta. There it was another odyssey to catch the bus that would drop us off in St. Julians. In total: 2 shuttles + 3 buses.

A girl we met told us that she had been living in Malta for 6 months and that absolutely everything on the island was a disaster, especially public transport.

Valletta reminded me of Istanbul, because there is the tourist part that is very beautiful and everything is clean and cared for, but when you get out of that, it is the same dirty and decadent Malta. In half a day you can see the city. We expected the city to be empty and it was also a chaos of people already at 9am when we arrived

In the afternoon my idea was to go to one of those wonderful beaches that I had seen on the internet to spend the afternoon and watch the sunset, but it turns out that there are no beaches there. At most, a stone from which you can jump and the water in the populated areas is very dirty.

We Googled Pembroke Beach and walked from our accommodation in St. Julians. We passed through an area even uglier and more decadent than St. Julians itself; You could tell that it was the typical party and drunkenness area. We saw a horrible beach; but the people who were there seemed not to realize about the garbage that surrounded them or how dirty the water was.

After more than an hour walking, we reached Pembroke beach and it was a stone with a ladder. No beach, no sand, no nothing. In other words, almost everything that Google shows as a beach in Malta, is stone.

Another day we took two buses and reached a point from which we started a hike to get to the Coral Lagoon. It was a route in which we saw many beaches (all ugly and massive) and the areas where the locals live.

Then we arrived at the area where the Coral Lagoon was and there was a ladder to go down the stone to snorkel. The water was crystal clear, but everything was full of garbage.

Diego tried to swim into the Coral Lagoon and could not enter because there were a lot of waves. At some point people jumped, but they prohibited it after several accidents.

In the afternoon we walked from our accommodation to Sliema to see the famous Cathedral (Knisja tal-Karmnu) from one of the most typical photos of Malta. In the video on my YouTube channel, you can see what the area is really like.

To get to Gozo it took us 2 and a half hours from when we left the apartment until we reached the center. The same it took us from Valencia to Malta. The only positive aspect is that Gozo does not have tall buildings, it is more cared for and had nothing to do with the chaos of Malta.

Gozo is the same desert and we left with the feeling that we lost the day because what we saw was nothing special. In fact, we chose to end up on a beach that according to the reviews was the most beautiful in Gozo and it was horrible: full of people and garbage and to top it off, two fishing boats right in front.

We found a remote area and we stayed there for a while, mainly because we needed to cool off after being in the sun all day.

The day we organized to go to Mdina was also a disaster with the buses. Malta reminded me of Costa Rica because to go to a place that was next door, you had to take 3 or 4 buses.

When it was our turn to catch the last bus, we realized that there was a sign at the stop saying that it was not going to go through there due to a road blockage. We went with a local lady to the right stop, and she also told us that public transport in Malta was chaos, that in addition to changing the stops, the buses always made a different route and that we must always asked the driver if he really was going through the place we wanted to go.

Mdina is one of those few neat and clean places in Malta and you have all the people queuing to take their picture at the entrance that appears on Game of Thrones. The bad thing is that it is all full of carriages with horses and it becomes quite annoying.

In the town where the Mdina is we saw some small catacombs that were free and not bad.

I liked Mosta because it is a relatively quiet area and there are no tall buildings. The basilica is not bad, and I found the bunker very interesting.

In the afternoon we went to Il Birgu which is the area that is right in front of Valletta and there we saw the sunset.

For our penultimate day in Malta, we went to see the St. Peter’s Pool which is one of the “top” things in Malta. We had to catch 3 buses each with its delay and then walk 40 minutes.

The St, Peter’s Pool is next to a harbor, so I already expected the water to be polluted. The whole area was filthy and full of garbage. There were lots of gray spots in the water, but tourists jumped on them without concern.

When we went to another part where there were natural pools, we realized that this gray matter was everywhere. Diego ended up with all his back full of it. We cleaned the gray spots of ourselves and saw that everyone was full of the same substance, but it seemed that they did not realize.

We could hike up the mountain to other supposed beaches that would also be stone and I was so disgusted that I told Diego to go to the hotel and that’s it.

On the last day we went to see the Dingli Cliffs since in Malta I didn’t even want to go to the beach anymore. As soon as we got off the bus, the garbage trail started. I have never done such a dirty hike. If garbage made me angry in Turkey, Malta is much worse.

We took the photos and went to the bus stop to go see the Blue Grotto.

Surprisingly we found a decent place. There were even garbage cans, and you didn’t see cigarette butts on the ground.

There was a concrete bathing area with a ladder to go down (like everything in Malta), but it was fine. There were quite a lot of people, but it was not as massive as you find in the rest of the beaches of Malta.

Here is the map so you can see each point we visited: