The Most Beautiful Places in Malta
8 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Malta are Fort Saint Elmo, Blue Grotto, Malta and Ġgantija. The list covers 8 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Malta is a small archipelago of golden limestone in the middle of the Mediterranean, and that soft, easily carved stone runs through its whole history. Prehistoric islanders used it to raise some of the oldest freestanding stone temples on earth; the Knights of St John later turned it into bastions and Baroque churches; and the sea has cut the same rock into caves, arches and coves of very clear water.
The megalithic temples come first in time. Ġgantija on Gozo dates from the fourth millennium BC, older than the pyramids of Giza, and Ħaġar Qim stands on the southern cliffs facing the islet of Filfla. Underground, the Hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni is a prehistoric necropolis carved into the rock on several levels, with chambers shaped and painted to imitate built architecture.
The Knights left Fort Saint Elmo, the star fort at the tip of the Valletta peninsula that held out during the Great Siege of 1565, and St. John's Co-Cathedral, plain outside and covered inside with gilded carving, marble tombstones and Caravaggio's Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. The Rotunda of Mosta carries one of the largest unsupported domes in Europe. Along the coast, the Blue Grotto opens a series of sea caves where sunlight turns the water vivid blue, and the Blue Lagoon between Comino and Cominotto is a shallow channel of pale turquoise over white sand.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fort Saint Elmo | Star fort | |
| 2 | Blue Grotto, Malta | Cave | |
| 3 | Ġgantija | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 4 | St. John's Co-Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 5 | Ħaġar Qim | Megalith | ✓ |
| 6 | Hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 7 | Rotunda of Mosta | Church building | |
| 8 | Blue Lagoon, Comino | Lagoon |
01 Fort Saint Elmo
Forti Sant'Iermu
Malta · 0.4 km from Valletta35.902° N 14.519° E
John Haslam · CC BY 2.0 Fort Saint Elmo is the star-shaped fort at the tip of Valletta's peninsula, commanding the mouths of both Grand Harbour and Marsamxett Harbour.
Did you know? The young military doctor Ċensu Tabone, later President of Malta, was inside the fort during the first air raid of 1940 and survived it.
02 Blue Grotto, Malta
Malta · 10.2 km from Valletta35.821° N 14.457° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Malta's Blue Grotto is not a single cave but a cluster of sea caverns cut into the limestone cliffs of the island's southern coast, just beyond the small fishing inlet of Wied iż-Żurrieq.
Did you know? A 1910 legal dispute between the villages of Qrendi and Żurrieq over who owned the coast here was settled in Qrendi's favour.
03 Ġgantija
Malta · 27.5 km from Valletta36.047° N 14.269° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Vitold Muratov · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ġgantija stands on the edge of the Xagħra plateau on Gozo, the second island of the Maltese archipelago, and it is the oldest of the megalithic temples that make up the Maltese World Heritage listing. Its two temples were raised around 3600 BC, which puts them centuries ahead of the Egyptian pyramids.
Did you know? Fragments of plaster stained with red ochre show that the inner walls were once smoothed over and painted rather than left as bare stone.
04 St. John's Co-Cathedral
Konkatidral ta' San Ġwann
Malta · 0.3 km from Valletta35.898° N 14.513° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by waldomiguez from Pixabay From the street, St John's in Valletta gives almost nothing away. Girolamo Cassar, the Maltese military engineer who laid out much of the new fortified capital after the Great Siege of 1565, gave the Knights of St John a sober, almost fortress-like front of local limestone.
Did you know? The chapel now belonging to the Langue of Germany was first given to the English knights, but changed hands after the English Reformation.
05 Ħaġar Qim
Malta · 10.3 km from Valletta35.828° N 14.442° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Hamelin de Guettelet · CC BY-SA 3.0 Ħaġar Qim, "the standing stones", sits on a ridge above Malta's south coast and is one of the island's great megalithic temples, built in the Ġgantija phase between 3600 and 3200 BC.
Did you know? An eighth reservoir at Il-Misqa is blocked by the roots of a mature fig tree.
06 Hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni
L-Ipogew ta’ Ħal Saflieni
Malta · 3.4 km from Valletta35.870° N 14.507° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
-jkb- · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni is an underground sanctuary and burial place cut into the limestone of Malta more than five thousand years ago, the only prehistoric underground temple of its kind known. It was found by accident in 1902, when workmen digging cisterns for new houses in Paola broke through its roof.
Did you know? The first excavator, Manuel Magri, died in Tunisia in 1907 and his report was lost; many bones and grave goods had been thrown away uncatalogued.
07 Rotunda of Mosta
Bażilika ta' Santa Marija Assunta, Mosta
Malta · 8.1 km from Valletta35.910° N 14.426° E
Image by JanneG from Pixabay A plain-looking town in the middle of Malta carries one of the largest church domes ever raised: the Rotunda of Mosta, officially the Sanctuary Basilica of the Assumption of Our Lady, rests its cupola on walls roughly nine metres thick, and the dome spans about 130 feet inside.
Did you know? Giorgio Grognet de Vassé had no formal architectural training, so he relied on advice from an architect of the Sammut family.
08 Blue Lagoon, Comino
Malta · 21.4 km from Valletta36.014° N 14.323° E
Image by Alehandra13 from Pixabay Between the island of Comino and its tiny, uninhabited neighbour Cominotto runs a shallow channel with a floor of pale sand, and it is that sand, reflecting the Mediterranean light back through clear water, that gives the Blue Lagoon its unreal turquoise.
Did you know? Because the king diverted those funds, Comino stayed undefended for roughly two more centuries until the Knights finally built St Mary's Tower.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Malta?
- On our list, Fort Saint Elmo ranks first, followed by Blue Grotto, Malta and Ġgantija.
- How old are Malta's megalithic temples?
- The oldest, such as Ġgantija on Gozo, date from around 3600 BC, which makes them older than Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza. They are inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Which Caravaggio painting is in St. John's Co-Cathedral?
- The cathedral's oratory holds Caravaggio's Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, painted in Malta in 1608. It is the only work he is known to have signed.
- What happened at the Rotunda of Mosta in 1942?
- During a wartime air raid in April 1942, a German bomb pierced the dome and fell among the congregation but failed to explode, an event long remembered locally as a miracle.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Malta?
- In our collection, the places in Malta are most often churches (2), archaeological sites (2), caves (1) and lagoons (1).
- How many places are on this list in Malta?
- The list covers 8 places.