Why I fell for Gozo, not Malta

The first time I stepped off the Cirkewwa ferry, I didn’t get it

It was mid-May 2018. We’d been in Malta for nine days — Valletta, Sliema, the Three Cities, a day down to Marsaxlokk — and I was starting to feel like I’d seen the script. Beautiful, yes. Stuffed with history, absolutely. But by the time we were boarding the ferry at Cirkewwa, I had already half-decided that Gozo was going to be a pleasant afterthought. A tick on the list.

Twenty minutes across the Channel of Malta, the ferry clanged into Mġarr, and everything changed.

It wasn’t dramatic. There was no thunderclap. The port at Mġarr is functional and slightly chaotic, the road up from the harbour involves a hairpin bend that makes the bus groan, and our rental car had a suspicious shimmy at anything over 50 km/h. But within an hour we were standing at the edge of Dwejra Bay, where the Azure Window used to be, watching the sea push through the broken rock arch that remained, and I felt something I hadn’t quite felt in all those days on Malta: quiet.

Not silence — there’s no real silence at the edge of the Mediterranean — but the particular quiet of a place that hasn’t been entirely optimised for your arrival.

What makes Gozo feel different

Gozo is smaller than Malta in every sense that matters to a traveller. It’s 67 square kilometres against Malta’s 316. It has roughly 37,000 residents against Malta’s 500,000. It has no casino, no Paceville, no Republic Street gift shops selling toy buses and Knights of Malta fridge magnets.

What it has is farmland that still looks farmed, village churches so oversized for their communities that they’re almost absurd, salt pans at Marsalforn that have been worked the same way since the Roman period, and coastal paths where you can walk for an hour without seeing another tourist.

The pace is structurally different. On Malta, even if you want to slow down, the infrastructure conspires against you — there’s always another site, another Tallinja bus, another WhatsApp notification about a restaurant opening in Valletta. On Gozo, the infrastructure gently prevents you from doing too much. The roads are narrow, the signage is sometimes optimistic, and the best reason to be in Xlendi at 7pm is to eat grilled fish and watch the boats, which takes as long as it takes.

I’m not romanticising the difficulty. It is less convenient. Getting to Gozo without a car means the ferry and the bus, which on a Sunday afternoon in May meant a 90-minute journey from Mġarr port to Victoria, Gozo’s capital, which should take 15 minutes by car. But even that enforced slowness felt like part of the deal.

Three things you only get on Gozo

The Citadella at dusk. Victoria’s medieval fortified city sits on a hill above the town and looks, from a distance, like something from a children’s storybook about medieval Europe. At dusk, when the tour groups have left and the light goes orange-pink over the farmland below, the Citadella’s bastions and the Cathedral of the Assumption become genuinely extraordinary. I’ve been to cities that spend millions trying to manufacture this feeling. In Gozo it just happens. The Citadella is free to walk and open late into the evening.

Ramla Bay without the sunlounger brigade. Ramla Bay is Gozo’s largest beach and the only one with proper red-orange sand. In high summer it gets busy, but in May it was easy — a handful of locals, a man with a dog, and water so clear I could see my feet at three metres depth. On Malta, the equivalent (Mellieha Bay, Golden Bay) would have been three times the people and half the clarity.

Ġgantija. I’ll say more about these temples in a separate post. But walking around the Ġgantija temples in Xaghra — 5,500 years old, older than Stonehenge, older than the Pyramids — with only about twenty other visitors, felt like one of the more improbable privileges of the whole trip. On Malta, even the less famous temples have more visitors. On Gozo, the scale is still human.

What you’d miss by skipping Malta

This isn’t a hate piece on Malta. It would be dishonest to write one.

Valletta is one of the most beautiful small capitals in the world. The baroque streets, the Co-Cathedral, the Grand Harbour view from the Upper Barrakka Gardens — these are legitimately extraordinary. The Three Cities across the Grand Harbour have a density of history per square metre that Gozo can’t match. The prehistoric temples at Hagar Qim are more complete and more accessible than anything on Gozo. The food scene in Valletta and Sliema is better, broader and more interesting.

Malta is also easier. Better bus connections, more accommodation choice at every price point, better medical infrastructure if you’re travelling with kids or older relatives, more GYG tours operating daily. If you have ten days and you’ve never been, you should spend at least six of them on Malta.

The mistake is treating Gozo as a half-day appendix to a Malta trip. A day trip from Sliema is better than nothing, but Gozo deserves an overnight at minimum. Two nights is ideal. Three days lets you breathe.

How to do Gozo first if you can only choose one

If you’re coming for the first time and genuinely torn — maybe you only have five days, maybe you don’t want to rent a car, maybe you’re not sure the temples are your thing — here’s how I’d structure it:

Start in Valletta for two nights. See the Co-Cathedral, walk the Three Cities by ferry, eat well. This is the Malta that will make sense of the rest. Then take the bus to Cirkewwa (bus 41 from Valletta, about an hour) and cross to Gozo. Stay two nights in Xlendi or Victoria. Walk the Citadella. Drive or taxi to Dwejra in the afternoon. Spend a morning at Ġgantija. Spend an afternoon at Ramla Bay. End your trip back in Sliema or St Julian’s for your last night before the flight.

Five days, two islands, one trip that actually earns Gozo its proper weight.

Malta: Gozo Full-Day Jeep with Lunch and Boat Transfers

If you want someone else to do the logistics, a full-day Gozo jeep tour covers Dwejra, the salt pans, Ramla Bay, and the Citadella in one sweep — useful for a first orientation before you know where you want to go back.

The thing no one tells you

The thing no one told me before that May trip: Gozo has become, quietly, one of the best places in the Mediterranean to simply be. Not to do, not to tick off, not to Instagram and move on. To be in.

The Azure Window is gone — the famous arch collapsed in a storm in March 2017, just over a year before we arrived. I expected to feel cheated. Instead, standing at the edge of Dwejra Bay watching the sea move through the gap where it used to stand, I felt like I’d arrived at a place that had made its peace with what it was now, not what it used to be.

That felt like Gozo in miniature. Not the headline, not the Instagram shot — the actual thing, which is better.

We went back in 2021. We’re going back again in 2026. Malta is still in the itinerary, but Gozo is the reason we booked.