Explore Birgu

The Inquisitor's Palace in Birgu was built in the 1530s as the law courts of the Order of St John and from 1574 to 1798 was the seat of the Roman Inquisition in Malta. Visitors see the inquisitors' apartments, the tribunal room, the chapel and the prison cells, whose walls still carry prisoners' graffiti; it also houses a museum of ethnography.

The Malta at War Museum occupies an 18th-century army barracks at the Couvre Porte gate of Birgu and tells the story of the islands in the Second World War, when they were among the most heavily bombed places in Europe. It shows the wartime newsreel Malta G.C., uniforms and objects of civilian life, and leads into a rock-cut air-raid shelter beneath the town.

Fort St Angelo stands at the tip of Birgu on the site of a medieval castle and was rebuilt by the Knights of St John from 1530 as their first seat in Malta. It was their headquarters during the Great Siege of 1565 and later served the Royal Navy as HMS St Angelo until 1979. Restored in 2015, it shows the fort's history, its chapels and the Grand Master's house.

Fort Rinella is a Victorian coastal battery built by the British in 1878–1886 to house a single 100-ton Armstrong gun, one of only two such guns surviving in the world. The battery keeps the gun in its emplacement along with magazines, barracks and the steam machinery that loaded it, and is run as a museum with costumed guides.

The Lascaris War Rooms are tunnels and chambers cut into the rock beneath the Upper Barrakka Gardens, opened in 1940 as the combined war headquarters for the defence of Malta. The Allied landings in Sicily in July 1943 were directed from here, and NATO used the complex until 1977. Restored operations rooms show the plotting tables and wall maps.

MUŻA is Malta's national community art museum, opened in 2018 in the Auberge d'Italie, the 16th-century inn of the Italian knights, whose Baroque facade carries a bronze bust of Grand Master Gregorio Carafa. It succeeded the National Museum of Fine Arts and shows Maltese and European art from the Middle Ages onwards, including works by Mattia Preti.

The Grandmaster's Palace was begun in 1571 as the residence of the Grand Masters of the Order of St John and later housed the British governors; today it is the Office of the President of Malta. Visitors see the State Rooms, corridors lined with painted friezes and armorial ceilings, and the Palace Armoury with some 5,000 pieces of arms and armour.

Casa Rocca Piccola is a 16th-century palazzo on Republic Street, still the home of the noble de Piro family. Visits lead through rooms furnished with the family's antique furniture, silver, paintings and costumes, a small chapel and a courtyard garden, and down into rock-cut shelters used by the household during the bombing of the Second World War.

The National Museum of Archaeology occupies the Auberge de Provence, built in 1571 to designs by Girolamo Cassar on Republic Street. It shows finds from Malta's prehistoric temples and tombs, among them the Sleeping Lady from the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum and the Venus of Malta from Ħaġar Qim, as well as Bronze Age and Phoenician objects.

Fort St Elmo is a star-shaped fort built in 1552 at the tip of the Sciberras peninsula, before Valletta existed. It fell after a month of bombardment in the Great Siege of 1565 and was rebuilt and enlarged by the Knights. Today it houses the National War Museum, whose exhibits run from prehistory to the Second World War, including the George Cross awarded to Malta in 1942.

The Tarxien Temples are a complex of four megalithic structures built between about 3600 and 2500 BC, excavated from 1915 by Themistocles Zammit. Stone blocks carved with spirals and friezes of animals, and the lower half of a large female statue, are shown in replica on site, with the originals in the National Museum of Archaeology. A canopy now shelters the remains.

Ħaġar Qim is a megalithic temple built between about 3600 and 3200 BC on a ridge above the southern coast of Malta and part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its facade and chambers use some of the largest stones of the Maltese temples, one about seven metres long. The Venus of Malta and seated 'fat figures' found here are in the National Museum of Archaeology.

Mnajdra is a group of three megalithic temples built between about 3600 and 2500 BC in a hollow above the sea, 500 metres below Ħaġar Qim, and part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The lower temple is aligned with the sun: at the equinoxes the first light passes straight through its main doorway, and at the solstices it falls on the edges of stone slabs inside.

The National Museum of Natural History is housed in Palazzo Vilhena, a French Baroque palace built in 1726–1728 for Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena to designs by Charles François de Mondion. Opened in 1973, it displays rocks, minerals and fossils, shells, insects, and the birds, mammals and marine life of the Maltese islands.

The Domvs Romana preserves the remains of a wealthy Roman town house of the 1st century BC, found in 1881 just outside the walls of Mdina. Its polychrome mosaic floors, among them a scene of doves drinking from a bowl, are shown in situ, with marble statues of the imperial family and everyday objects, in a neoclassical museum building of 1882.

The Wignacourt Museum occupies the Baroque residence of the chaplains of the Knights of St John in Rabat, founded under Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt in the early 17th century. It is linked to St Paul's Grotto, where tradition says the apostle lived on Malta, and shows paintings by Mattia Preti and Antoine Favray, catacombs and Second World War shelters.

St Paul's Catacombs are a group of underground cemeteries cut into the rock outside the walls of the Roman town of Melite, used from the 3rd century AD for pagan, Jewish and Christian burials. More than 20 of the tombs can be entered; the largest has two round agape tables carved from the rock, where funeral meals were held.