What Malta felt like in lockdown spring 2020

We’d booked ten days. We stayed ninety.

We landed in Malta on March 10, 2020, for what was supposed to be a ten-day spring trip. Four days later, the Maltese government closed the borders and suspended all commercial flights. The guesthouse where we were staying — a small family-run place in a Valletta side street — offered us a long-stay rate. We had no option but to accept.

We stayed until June 9, 2020, when the first repatriation flight to the UK left from Malta International Airport. By the time we left, we knew Valletta in a way that ten days could never have given us, and we had watched Malta’s relationship with its own tourism disappear and begin to reassemble in real time.

The first two weeks

The speed was remarkable. Malta went from a functioning tourist economy — restaurants full, the Grand Harbour cruise terminal operational, walking tours running three times a day — to something close to a standstill within ten days.

By March 20, Republic Street was empty at noon on a Thursday. The coffee bar at the bottom of St Lucia Street, where we’d had breakfast two mornings running, was closed. The doors of St John’s Co-Cathedral — which normally opens to a queue of 200 people before 9am — were shut. The tourist shops, the cafés, the souvenir kiosks: shuttered.

What remained was the city itself. Valletta without the tourism layer is smaller, quieter, and in some ways more honest. The residential population — around 6,000 people in the city, mostly older Maltese families — went about their lives with a practicality that felt reassuring. The vegetable van came through on Tuesdays. The church rang the Angelus at noon and 6pm. The ferry across the harbour to Birgu continued running because people needed it.

We lived in this version of Valletta for the first month.

What you could see when the crowds were gone

The architecture is the first thing. Valletta is a city that was designed on a grid in the 16th century by the Knights of Malta, and the grid makes the most of the ridge of land it sits on — every cross street framing the sea at the end of it. In normal times, the tourist density on these streets (Republic Street, particularly, but also Merchants Street and Old Theatre Street) makes the spatial quality of the place hard to see. You’re looking past the crowd at the buildings.

Without the crowd, walking up Republic Street at 8am in April, you could see what the place actually was: a small perfect city, the baroque facades in warm limestone, the cross-streets framing the harbour light at either end, the upper Barrakka Gardens gardens with their view of the Grand Harbour and not a single other person. We sat up there for an hour some mornings, looking at the view that usually has 300 people in it, and felt something like owners of a place we had absolutely no right to own.

The Three Cities — Birgu, Senglea, Cospicua — were a version of themselves we could never have seen under normal conditions. Birgu’s alleyways, which in July are full of walking tours and photography sessions, were empty enough that we could hear our own footsteps. A cat sat in the middle of a street with the attitude of an animal that knew the traffic was gone. The waterfront at Senglea — the Grand Harbour view south from the safe-harbour watchtower — was ours alone for a Tuesday afternoon.

The Malta that emerged

The Maltese response to the lockdown was, broadly speaking, coherent and community-oriented. Malta is small enough (and has enough old-building density) that the community-mutual-aid mechanisms that larger countries had lost came back quickly. Our landlady started leaving food outside neighbouring doors for elderly residents who couldn’t go out.

There was a specific quality to how people dealt with the tourist economy disappearing from under them. Some panic, yes — Malta’s dependence on tourism is real and the GDP hit was going to be severe. But a particular Maltese pragmatism that we’d observed since arriving became more visible: a sense that this was a crisis to be managed rather than a catastrophe to be endured.

By May, Valletta had developed a new rhythm. The restaurants that had stayed open — delivery and collection only, eventually some outdoor tables — were doing steady business. The Sunday morning market at Marsaxlokk, which had been one of the first things to shut, reopened in a reduced form with socially distanced stalls. The Valletta ferry to Sliema ran on a reduced schedule.

What I learned about Malta from this

Three months in a place during a crisis changes your relationship to it differently from three months of normal life. You see the infrastructure of the ordinary rather than the presentation of the extraordinary.

What I saw in spring 2020:

The city functions without us. Valletta has a life that exists independent of the 2.8 million annual visitors. It’s quieter and less economically buoyant, but it’s real, coherent, and in certain ways more beautiful than the tourist version.

The bus network is genuinely good. The Tallinja buses ran throughout the pandemic, reduced in frequency but consistent. Malta’s public transport is often dismissed by travel writers as “complicated” but it’s actually a reasonably functional network once you learn it — and learning it, without the distraction of sightseeing, was something the lockdown provided time for.

The fortress walls mean something. Valletta was built by people who understood that survival required walls. Walking the Valletta bastions and the Three Cities fortifications during lockdown, with the context of a pandemic making concepts like defence and enclosure newly legible, felt different from walking them as a tourist. These are walls built to keep plague out, among other things. They didn’t fail at being walls.

The sea is always there. On the worst days, which came in April when the news from Italy and Spain was bad and uncertainty was at its highest, the right move was to walk down to the Grand Harbour and look at the water. The sea doesn’t care about crises. It keeps moving. In Malta, you are never more than a few minutes from it, and this matters more than it sounds.

The strange gift of it

I don’t want to romanticise what was a genuinely frightening and economically damaging period. People lost their livelihoods. The tourism industry — which directly or indirectly touches almost everyone in Malta — was in crisis.

But three months of lockdown in Valletta gave us something that no normal holiday could have given: the city as it actually is. Not the destination. The place. These are different things, and we would never have known the difference without the accident of that particular March flight.

We’ve been back twice since. Each time, the tourist city is there in full force — Republic Street busy, the Harbour Cruise boats running, the Co-Cathedral queue. And underneath it, we can still find the city we lived in for those ninety days. It takes knowing where to look.