Malta Day 5 - Victoria Lines

The weather on our last full day was very windy with occasional showers, but we decided to brave the elements and walk a section of the Victoria Lines - a British built fortification system that crosses Malta. We drove to a technical school close to Fort Mosta and Rani found a custodian who showed us how to access the remains of the fortified wall through the school property. Normally the walls could be accessed through public gardens, but these were closed for renovations.

We walked several kilometers of the wall toward the west after first heading east to the edge of the Fort (now closed to the public because it is used for ammunition storage). The wall walk is a bit rough in places and nicely paved in others. People have built their houses into the wall requiring detours to avoid dogs and private property signs. We found the most interesting part of the walk to be at the Bingemma Gap (this also seems to be the most photographed part of the wall). Here we saw a chapel dating from 1670 and catacombs (small interconnected caves in the limestone rock) that are most likely 1500 years old.

Typical tourist information sign - note the walled town of Mdina in the distance

Rani walking a section of the wall - we are outside the moat here and had to walk for a couple of kilometers before we were able to climb the wall and get on the right side of things again

A stone structure viewed from the wall - near the Bingemma Gap

Fields provide a foreground for Rabat and Mdina

Panorama looking northwest from the all near Bingemma

More useful tourist signage - to be fair we did find one sign that had some barely legible text on it still but most signage is in this state

Limestone quarry - the quarrying work was done to less than a meter from the road we were walking on with a 100 foot hole immediately beside the road and the historic wall a few meters away,

View West showing the Victoria Lines in the distance

Not sure what these structures or wall workings are here at the Bingemma Gap

Loop holes

Much photographed section of the wall at Bingemma is the most impressive part that we walked - below and to the right and left are catacombs carved into the rock

Hiding from the wind, we had lunch in this shelter that was presumably once higher walled and roofed.

Catacombs and wall

Another catacomb - chambers are interconnected and each would have contained one or more burials

The opening would have been closed originally and probably plastered over - vandals likely robbed these many hundreds of years ago

We ran into these sheep and goats within the fortifications near Bingemma