From the citadel of Victoria, you can see nearly the entire island of Gozo, Malta’s smaller island. I thought this was a neat trick considering the fortified city is only about 400 feet above sea level. Fields already green in early March rippled across the landscape like so many inbound waves. Through notches in the distant hills, I could see slivers of the Med. It called to me. I texted back and said I’d be there soon. The ability to see the whole island was surely beneficial during the golden age of Mediterannean piracy, when local rulers forced all island inhabitants to sleep inside the citadel during summer nights so they wouldn’t get kidnapped. There was no sign of pirates today, which meant I was in the clear to hike all the way to the coast.
Victoria’s citadel and view
Day 1: Saltpans Walk (North shore)
Ten minutes into my walk, the traffic-jammed city dissolved around me. Gently rolling hills and mesas popped up to say hello, and my stress level dropped to zero. The lush landscape was diced up by dry stone walls covered in prickly pear cacti, which struck me as terribly unlikely. I was so used to seeing dry stone walls in places like Ireland where the walls were covered in ferns and moss and they only contained sheep. Here, the smallholding fields were filled to bursting with ripening wheat and olives and onions. I paused to take a photograph and jumped when a farmer popped up on the other side of the wall with a hoe in his hand.
Six thousand years of continuous human life on a tiny island means the Gozo landscape is unfailingly pastoral, and wilderness only exists in the margins. At first the trail followed a river of asphalt and the occasional dry riverbed too, where birds and native plants had carved out spaces for themselves. Fist-sized hollows in the fine dirt were decorated with tiny footprints, which told me where the birds had their daily sand baths to clean their feathers. Civilization came in ebbs and flows: a village here, a chapel there, a creaky windmill that once drew water from an aquifer. Within an hour I reached the coast, and there, finally, the wilderness was allowed to breathe.
At last my boots found a proper trail. I followed the ancient but short Wied il-Gฤงasri riverbed, where the hint of freshwater running through its channel didn’t even clear the soles of my boots. The ravine quickly deepened until I was on a high ridge covered with knee-high spurges and wildflowers. A staircase hewn from the rock led me to the bottom of the ravine, where I stood on a low shelf of rock. Deep turquoise water sloshed in the river channel, looking almost glacial in hue, but the truth was even stranger: the Mediterranean has claimed the old ravine for itself. I couldn’t even see the open sea from my vantage point, but I could definitely see the incoming wave that doglegged through the channel and slipped into a cave hidden beneath my feet. Seconds later a hollow BOOM echoed through the air and the whitewater re-emerged to smash into the next roller coming in from the sea.
From there I beelined to the hike’s main attraction: the salt pans. The first one I came across was such an unlikely thing that I just stared at it for a long while. I’d been expecting them, considering the walk was called “salt pans” and I chose it specifically because I wanted to see salt pans, but I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around it.
A hatchwork of rectangular pools covered the landscape, from small shallow ones where the water could never be more than a few centimeters deep to big ones so deep you could have swum in them (although that’s forbidden). I stood at the geometric intersection of 3 different channels that crossed each other at different depths in the stone and wondered at it. Humans are ingenious, or batshit. Probably both.
Salt, at one time, was one of humanity’s most prized minerals. It was a tool for building empires and waging wars because of its value as a food preservative and flavoring. Allegedly it was even used as a currency – just think of the idiom “a woman worth her salt” – and some say the word “salary” has Latin roots in “salt.” The trouble was, there were only two ways to get the precious substance: either mine rock salt from the bones of the Earth, or get a bunch of seawater and evaporate it.
The south Mediterranean hardly lacks for seawater, sunshine, or wind, which are the three ingredients for the second recipe. More importantly, Gozo’s coast is a wide flat pancake made of sandstone. The pale stone is so soft that humans can easily dig into it, whether they’re Gen X teens making lewd graffiti or Roman men making salt pans (and probably lewd graffiti). It was also thick with marine skeletons. Shells and sand dollars that had been buried for untold invertebrate generations were slowly emerging back into the world, resurrected by the patient scouring of the elements.
Speaking of scouring elements, the sea was absolutely raging that day. A cyclone had v-e-eer-y slowly passed between Malta and the coast of Africa over the previous few days, and while the rains had finally passed, the winds and ocean swells were still screaming in from Greece. At the edge of the cliff I spied an old metal railing that almost gave me tetanus just from looking at it. Still, curiosity won out. I trusted the winds even less than I did the railing, which I held gingerly before peering over it. My stomach dropped into my feet. Through a perfectly square hole in the rock, I learned in quick succession that a) I was standing on a very thin shelf of rock and b) the churning ocean was just a few meters directly below my feet. I recoiled like I’d been shocked, barely jumping out of the way before a wave smashed against the rock with such force that the spray rained down for three full seconds.
I walked east along the narrow shelf overlooking the sea, passing almost a solid kilometer of salt pans. The pans have been in continuous use for untold human generations, since before the Romans at least, but they lie dormant until summer when the sun is hot enough to evaporate the water. Nevertheless the clouds and sea kept the pools full, and they sparkled with every color from beige to turquoise. Some were orderly and quadratic, others rounded to fit into the waves of sandstone, and still others were so whimsically placed that I wondered if their makers had simply been bored. The remote coast was almost deserted besides a few hikers and tourists and local men fishing at the edge of the cliff with poles that were taller than some of the trees in my garden.
At the end of salt pan row, I came upon a wizened man sitting on his tailgate fixing a fishing buoy. Behind him was a dark rectangular gash in the soft sandstone. It was a full-blown cave, reminiscent of those in Cappadocia, which the Maltese used for storing harvested salt. Most of the caves are open to the elements now, but this one had a proper door and it was filled with salt products for sale. The wizened man followed me in and explained in stilted English what everything cost. I chose two little bags for 3.50 each, which seemed like a steal for something that was once worth more than gold, not to mention something that this sixth-generation harvester had reaped from the sea by hand. The shopkeeper’s hands that caught my coins were alarmingly thick and red from decades of working with the salt. I stepped back into the light and inspected the precious white flakes, which were lightly speckled with dark flecks of seaweed. The sun glimmered overhead. Maybe it too approved of its handiwork.
A few beach bars appeared, the first whiff of hedonism I’d caught since leaving Victoria, and I snagged one of the homemade fresh-fruit lemonades the Maltese are fond of and sat for awhile watching the rollers come in. My final stop for the day was just around the corner, where a little peninsula of rock stabs out into the ocean at Qolla l-Bajda Battery. It was, maybe ironically, being battered by the sea. I watched the chaos for nearly an hour with my camera in hand, trying to predict which incoming waves would have the most spectacular performances. Sadly I only managed to catch the biggest waves with my eyes, but I assure you I tell no fisherman’s tale when I say the greatest plumes were over 40 feet tall.
Day 2: Xlendi Walk (South shore)
The Mediterranean gnaws at Gozo. Its shoreline bears the scars both new and old: its weathered bays have shining cuts where entire layers of Earth fell away, somewhere between one and fifty storms ago, and its cliffs are riddled with caves. Even Gozo’s ancient riverbeds that formed before the last ice age have all been reclaimed by the sea, just like the Wied il-Gฤงasri I saw the day before. Really, it’s a wonder Gozo still exists at all.
Gozo is such a bite-sized thing that you can hike around its entire coast in a few days. Ambition has never been my vice, though, so I just went for a half-day chunk of its southern shore. I took a 15-minute bus ride from my home base of Victoria to the ferry docks of Mgarr, and then spent the next 5 hours walking back along the coast to the river mouth of Xlendi. As one does.
Only two minutes away from the bustling ferry dock, I rounded a fold in the landscape and slipped into another world. The trappings of city life vanished, besides a cathedral whose spire poked up inquisitively over the hillside. Native plants blanketed the earth. Songbirds trilled from high atop the cacti, speaking out in defiance against the songbird hunters who devastate their numbers each year. The gnarled coast stretched up and away as far as I could see, reaching out towards distant Tunisia.
Native life: Barbary-nut iris (Moraea sisyrinchium), Maltese wall lizard (Podarcis filfolensis), and corn spurge (Euphorbia segetalis).
All of the humans I saw over the next hour were either hikers or scuba divers who were headed for shipwrecks that had been scuttled just offshore to create artificial reefs. Knowing the ships had been sunk on purpose didn’t make me any less uneasy to be so close to them; my submechanophobia is not a thing to be reasoned with. Still, the map said there was something called a ‘fougasse’ at the shoreline, and I had questions. A fougasse, I’m happy to report, is a land-cannon. Specifically it’s an enormous hole dug out of the bedrock that slants towards the sea. The chamber is so big you could drive a car into it. Soldiers would fill it with boulders and explosives to try and sink enemy ships with the scattershot. Do you remember what I said about humans being batshit, or ingenious, or both?
There were a few beaches along the way, if by “beach” you mean a place where humans can easily get into the sea. Welcoming sandy places they are not. One such scraggly beach sits at the end of the ix-Xini river channel, where ancient seafarers came to fix their boats and Brangelina once shot a movie. The seas were finally calm, and the channel was a turquoise mirror. I followed it half a kilometer inland, watching wetsuited snorkelers drift from one end to the other. A prickly pear cactus had been artfully grown over the trail as a cute gateway to the beach. Families gathered for pictures on the beach and to eat a late-morning snack at the shaded beach restaurant. What a splendid idea.
After my tea break, the cliffs began to grow in earnest. I didn’t notice at first because the trail swung inland for awhile and climbed only slowly upwards, but by the time I’d reunited with the coast, the cliffs were vertiginous. I laid on the ground and inch-wormed my way up to the dropoff, white-knuckling the flat stone like I was afraid I’d slide off. A sheer white wall plummeted beneath my nose. The experience was enough to convince me to stay at least a body’s length away from the edge for the rest of the hike, not least because of the wind.
The wind was maddening. It howled ceaselessly across my ears and did battle with my hair and came from every direction at once. It was the kind of wind that literally takes your breath away. I stopped breathing just to see what would happen, and its pressure stole the air from my lungs. I wondered, not for the first time, how long I could go on like that, with my chest still and the world breathing for me. However, I didn’t fancy a cliffside fainting spell, so eventually I breathed in deep.
The nearer I got to Xlendi, the more dramatic and crowded the cliffs became. First it was a shepherd and his flock, who were grazing alarmingly close to the dropoff. Then the hiking trail widened into a paved walking path with barriers and park benches. Walkers in flip-flops sat with whole pizzas they’d carried in for a little afternoon picnic with a view. More power to them: in my opinion there’s no wrong way to appreciate nature. I passed spellbound gentlemen and young families taking videos, determined hikers and locals walking their dogs. There was almost a city-park feeling to it, except we were at the edge of a sun-drenched and windswept Mediterranean island with views rambling off towards the horizon.
I glanced out again at the sea before heading inland to Xlendi. There were still no pirates in sight. Maybe they were scared of the fougasse.
Tips for Gozo hiking
These routes: these hikes are both available on the official Gozo tourism website here. They are called the “Saltpans Walk” and the “Xlendi Walk” respectively. You can download full PDF brochures and Google Maps layers on the website, or get paper versions at the tourist offices. I do recommend choosing at least one of these options if you want to do a specific hike, because the way is not signposted and the red-dot trail markings only occasionally exist. The brochures give detailed instructions about which roads to turn onto. (If you lose the Google Maps layer, go into the You tab at the bottom, scroll down to Maps, and there you’ll see the layers. Note they will only load when you have cell service.)
About hiking: there are a few hills and gravely bits, but the trails are generally easy. Take water and snacks with you because refuelling options outside towns are limited. Cell coverage was 5G in most places besides a few dead zones. There is zero shade or shelter on the trails, so take care if you decide to hike in summer. All towns have bus options (or Bolt/Uber) if you want to cut your trip short.
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