Valletta one year after being European Capital of Culture

The bunting came down on January 1, 2019

Valletta 2018 was the Maltese capital’s year as European Capital of Culture — a designation it shared with Leeuwarden in the Netherlands and Plovdiv in Bulgaria. Over twelve months, the city hosted more than 400 cultural events: theatre, music, art installations, architectural projects, open-air performances. The Grand Harbour was used as a stage. Republic Street was reimagined. The old commercial buildings along the waterfront were repurposed as exhibition spaces.

And then, as always happens with these things, the year ended.

By February 2020, I’d been back to Valletta three times since 2018 — once in spring 2019, once in autumn 2019, and this February. I was trying to assess what the Capital of Culture year had actually left behind, beyond the promotional material and the self-congratulatory official reports.

The answer is: more than you’d expect from a purely ceremonial designation, and less than the most optimistic accounts claimed.

What demonstrably changed

The streets. The Capital of Culture project involved a significant investment in Valletta’s public spaces. Valletta’s historically chaotic street furniture — signage, cables, urban clutter accumulated over decades — was rationalised. Some pavements were repaved or widened. The general visual quality of the public realm improved in ways that are still visible two years later.

This might seem like a small thing. In a city as small and densely built as Valletta (the whole walled city is less than a square kilometre), the texture of the public space is everything. The 2018 improvements haven’t degraded; they’re still there.

The arts infrastructure. Several venues that were created or expanded for 2018 have remained operational. Spazju Kreattiv, the national community arts centre at St James Cavalier, expanded its programming significantly during 2018 and has maintained a more ambitious schedule since. The Valletta Contemporary gallery, which opened in 2018, established itself as a serious contemporary art space. The MUZA museum — Malta’s national community art museum — opened its new home in the Auberge d’Italie as part of the 2018 program and has remained one of the better cultural institutions in the city.

These additions to Valletta’s cultural landscape are permanent and valuable. The city has a richer arts scene in 2020 than it did in 2016.

The habit of using the streets. One of the 2018 programme’s explicit goals was to “give Valletta back to the Maltese” — to encourage the island’s population to engage with the capital as a cultural space rather than a place they visited for administrative purposes or avoided during tourist season. There’s evidence that this worked, at least partially.

The evening economy in Valletta is more active in 2019-2020 than it was before 2018. The restaurants in the back streets — particularly around Strait Street, which has been reviving as a nightlife corridor — are busier with local customers. The sense that Valletta is a place for Maltese people to spend an evening, not just tourists on a day visit, is stronger than it was before the Capital of Culture year.

The tourism numbers. Malta’s tourist arrivals grew significantly between 2017 and 2019. Some of this growth was happening regardless — budget air travel was expanding, Malta was increasingly on the mainstream European short-break circuit — but the Capital of Culture designation and the associated international press coverage accelerated the trend. Whether this growth in tourism is uncomplicated good news is, as we note in other parts of this site, open to question.

What reverted or failed to stick

The experimental programming. The Capital of Culture year included some genuinely interesting and non-commercial cultural programming: site-specific performances, community art projects in neighbourhoods outside the tourist circuit, events that weren’t primarily there to attract visitors. Most of this has not continued. The city’s cultural budget is finite and the post-2018 programming has settled back toward safer and more commercially viable territory.

The international attention. The cultural capital designation generates a burst of international media coverage that typically lasts about 18 months before attention moves on to the following year’s cities. By late 2019, the international press angle on Valletta had reverted to the standard Malta travel story: weather, beaches, history, food. The framing of Valletta as a genuinely experimental cultural city — which the best 2018 coverage had advanced — faded.

The visitor distribution. One ambition of the 2018 program was to distribute cultural tourism more evenly across Valletta and beyond — to encourage visitors to explore the Three Cities, Mdina, the south of the island, rather than concentrating on the usual Valletta circuit. There’s no strong evidence that this redistribution happened. The tourist flows in 2019 look similar to the tourist flows in 2016: Republic Street, the Co-Cathedral, the Upper Barrakka Gardens, the ferry to Sliema.

The broader question: what does a Capital of Culture actually do?

The European Capital of Culture designation is a policy instrument, not a magic spell. What it reliably does: inject investment into a city’s cultural infrastructure for one year, generate international press coverage, focus civic energy on cultural programming. What it doesn’t do: fundamentally change a city’s relationship to culture or permanently shift international perceptions.

Valletta in 2020 is a better city for the Capital of Culture year. The specific improvements — the public realm work, the new and expanded institutions, the stronger arts infrastructure — have remained. The more ambitious claims made during the year (that it would transform Malta’s cultural economy, that it would permanently shift Valletta’s international profile) have not fully materialised.

This is, broadly speaking, the pattern with Capital of Culture cities. The designation is most valuable when the investment in infrastructure is real, and when the host city has existing strengths to build on. Valletta had both: genuine architectural and historical distinction, and a political will to invest meaningfully in the year.

The MUZA museum is the thing to see

Of everything the 2018 programme left behind, the MUZA museum — Malta’s national community art museum in the Auberge d’Italie on Merchants Street — is the most lasting contribution. The collection covers Maltese visual art from the medieval period through the 20th century, housed in a restored 16th-century building that is itself part of the exhibition. The entry fee is modest. The crowds are rarely overwhelming.

If you’re spending a day in Valletta and you want to understand the visual culture of this particular place — how Maltese painters processed the baroque influence of their Italian neighbours, how the island’s history appears in its art — MUZA is the right place to go.

The walking tour guide for Valletta includes the MUZA and the surrounding Merchants Street area. The three-hour route covers most of what the Capital of Culture year improved upon.

The legacy is quieter than the year was. That’s how legacies usually work.