Ħaġar Qim

Interesting facts

In 1647 the Maltese historian Giovanni Francesco Abela took the ruins as proof that the island's first inhabitants had been a race of giants.

The prehistorian V. Gordon Childe, who knew ancient sites from Mesopotamia to Switzerland, said he had seen nothing anywhere as old as this place.

Nearby on a bare hilltop, Il-Misqa holds seven bell-shaped reservoirs cut into the rock and fed by channels; five still fill with water after normal rain.

An eighth reservoir at Il-Misqa is blocked by the roots of a mature fig tree.

In the oldest part of the temple, a slab with round hollows seems to have held libation jars, whose oval bases were made to stand in them.

The main oval court is about 14.3 metres long; pierced slabs screening its side apses are thought to have once been hung with curtains.

The outer wall of huge upright blocks leans inward, and one apse is built like an arch, so that the slabs could not topple into the rooms.

On 17 September 1949 three statuettes and fragments of a much larger stone figure were found buried together beneath a rectangular stone.

A curved bastion wall about 20 metres long flanks the temple, possibly to keep out the wild animals then common on the islands.

The French artist Jean-Pierre Houël made an engraving of the ruins in 1776, long before the first excavation.

Why it is worth it

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. It is part of the Megalithic Temples of Malta World Heritage Site, and it shares a clifftop park with Mnajdra, about 500 m away nearer the shore. Visiting the two together is the natural plan: Ħaġar Qim is built of soft globigerina limestone that weathers badly, Mnajdra of harder coralline stone, and both now stand under protective shelters completed in 2009.

The façade has a trilithon doorway and a bench running along the outside, and it contains the largest stone used in any Maltese temple: a slab about 5.2 m high and weighing around 57 tonnes. Inside, a central passage opens into oval chambers paved with smooth blocks, with low altars along the walls, some still blackened by fire. One recess holds a stone with a hole through it, known as the oracle hole, which carries sound between chambers and has been linked to the summer solstice sunrise. In place of the usual north-west apse the builders added four separate enclosures, and the northern part of the complex, the oldest, has three superimposed floors. Stone balls lying along the walls are thought to be the rollers used to move the megaliths.

The site was first cleared in 1839 by a Royal Engineers officer, J. G. Vance, who sent an altar, a decorated slab and seven stone figurines to Valletta, where they are in the National Museum of Archaeology along with the carved altar with plant motifs. The famous "Venus of Malta" was found here in 1950. No human burials have ever been found in the temples, only animal bones. A visitors' centre near the entrance has an audio-visual introduction and displays with reproductions of the finds. A short walk away stands Ħamrija Tower, one of the coastal watchtowers built under Grand Master Martin de Redin.

Getting there

The temples lie about 2 km from the village of Qrendi on Malta's south coast. Malta International Airport (MLA) is only about 5 km away, which makes Ħaġar Qim one of the easiest major sites to reach from the airport. The town of Qormi is about 6 km away.

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From the encyclopaedia

Ħaġar Qim is a megalithic temple complex found on the Mediterranean island of Malta, dating from the Ġgantija phase (3600–3200 BC). The Megalithic Temples of Malta are among the most ancient religious sites on Earth, described by the World Heritage Sites committee as "unique architectural masterpieces." In 1992 UNESCO recognized Ħaġar Qim and four other Maltese megalithic structures as World Heritage Sites. V. Gordon Childe, Professor of Prehistoric European Archeology and director of the Institute of Archaeology in the University of London from 1946 to 1957 visited Ħaġar Qim. He wrote, "I have been visiting the prehistoric ruins all round the Mediterranean, from Mesopotamia to Egypt, Greece and Switzerland, but I have nowhere seen a place as old as this one."

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia