Malta

Where the islands sit and what they hold

The three inhabited islands, Malta, Gozo and Comino, lie 93 kilometres from the nearest point in Sicily and 288 kilometres from the nearest point in Tunisia, and with the uninhabited rocks of Cominotto, Filfla and St Paul's Islands they come to 316 square kilometres of coralline limestone. People have been living on them since at least 6500 BC, when Mesolithic hunter-gatherers crossed roughly 100 kilometres of open water to reach them. The rock rises to 253 metres at Ta' Dmejrek near Dingli, where the south-western coast breaks off in cliffs, while the northern and eastern slopes sink into drowned valleys that became the harbours everything else was built around.

Rain is the constraint the rock imposes. Annual rainfall averages about 550 millimetres, more than three quarters of it between October and March, and there is no permanent river and no lake on any of the islands. Groundwater was the whole supply until the aquifers were drawn down past what they could carry: the first seawater reverse osmosis plant opened at Għar Lapsi in 1982, producing 20,000 cubic metres a day, and by the FAO's water resources review of 2006 desalination accounted for about 55% of potable water production.

Almost nobody lives outside a town. Britannica puts about 95% of the population in urban areas, which on this much ground means the built-up part of the main island runs continuously through what were once separate villages. Valletta, the capital the Order of St John laid out in 1566, holds 320 monuments inside 55 hectares on a peninsula between two harbours. Malta: geography follows the tilt of the limestone through the water, the soil and the coasts.

Why the language outlived the rulers who brought it

Arab forces took the islands from the Byzantines in 870 and, on the account of the chronicler Al-Himyarī, left them practically uninhabited until settlers arrived from Sicily around 1048 and 1049. Those settlers spoke Siculo-Arabic, the Maghrebi Arabic dialect that had developed in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091. The Normans landed in 1091, the expulsion of the Muslims was complete by 1249, and from that point the vernacular on Malta developed with no contact with the Arabic-speaking world and no diglossic relationship to Classical Arabic. It has always been written in the Latin alphabet.

Everything the later rulers brought went into the vocabulary. About 52% of modern Maltese words are Italian or Sicilian in origin, 32% Arabic or Siculo-Arabic, 10% French and 6% English, while most of the function words stayed Arabic, which is why the commonest speech is also the oldest layer of it.

Recognition came late. The first known written reference is a will of 1436 that calls the language lingua maltensi, and the oldest surviving text is Il-Kantilena of Pietru Caxaro from the fifteenth century. The Order conducted its business in French and Italian, Britain encouraged English while Italian kept its prestige, and in 1934 Maltese took Italian's place as an official language beside English. Article 74 of the constitution now provides that where the Maltese and English texts of a law conflict, the Maltese text prevails, and Maltese is the language of the courts. What the spoken language carried is the subject of its own article, along with the parish year and the band clubs.

Who ruled the islands before the republic

The temple builders came first and left no writing. The complexes at Ġgantija, Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra, Skorba, Ta' Ħaġrat and Tarxien were raised during the fourth and third millennia BC, in phases of construction running from about 5200 to 2500 BC, and they are among the earliest free-standing stone buildings anywhere. Everything after them arrived by sea. Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks and Romans held the islands in antiquity, Byzantine rule ran from 535 to 870, Arab rule from 870 to 1090, the Normans and their Swabian successors from 1091 to 1266, a short Angevin period from 1266 to 1282, and Spanish feudal lords from 1282 to 1530.

In 1530 the Holy Roman emperor Charles V handed Malta to the Order of the Knights of Rhodes, homeless since Suleiman I drove them off that island in 1522. The Order withstood the siege of 1565, founded Valletta the following year, and stayed until Napoleon took the islands in 1798. The French garrison provoked a revolt within months, and Britain held Malta from 1800 to 1964, running the Grand Harbour as the headquarters of its Mediterranean fleet.

The end of that arrangement was decided at the ballot box more than once. A referendum on integrating with the United Kingdom, held on 11 and 12 February 1956, returned 77.02% in favour, but a boycott by the Nationalist Party and the Church held the turnout to 59.1% of the electorate and the result was treated as inconclusive. Malta took independence on 21 September 1964, became a republic on 13 December 1974, and watched the last British forces leave on 31 March 1979, a date kept since as Freedom Day. Malta: history follows the whole sequence and the terms attached to each transfer.

What Britain left in the statute book

The parliamentary system and the public administration are modelled on Westminster, and the law underneath them is mixed. The civil code was drawn up mainly between 1854 and 1873 along Napoleonic lines; criminal proceedings and fiscal and maritime legislation follow English common law; judicial precedent binds nobody; and all of it is argued in Maltese. A courtroom in Valletta is the tidiest place to see the three layers at once.

Parliament has one chamber. Sixty-five members are elected by single transferable vote in thirteen five-seat divisions for a term of five years, and the constitution then adjusts what the count produced. After the general election of 2022 the House gained two seats to restore proportionality between votes and representation, and twelve further members under the mechanism that seats more women, which brought it to seventy-nine. Turnout in that election was 304,050 of the 355,075 citizens entitled to vote, the lowest since 1955, against a long pattern in which more than nine tenths of the electorate has generally voted.

Local government arrived by statute rather than by inheritance. The Local Councils Act of 1993 divided the islands into 54 councils on Malta and 14 on Gozo, elected by the same transferable vote. Malta adopted a policy of neutrality in 1980, voted 53.65% in favour of European Union membership on 8 March 2003, joined the Union on 1 May 2004 and adopted the euro on 1 January 2008. Malta: politics works through the corrective mechanisms, the judiciary and what neutrality means inside the Union.

How the church still keeps the calendar

Article 2 of the constitution establishes Roman Catholicism as the religion of Malta, with entrenched provisions for freedom of conscience and worship, and 83% of the population identified as Catholic in a Eurobarometer survey in 2019. The arrangement is administrative as well as declaratory: the state and the Church each run schools that charge no fees, and the state pays part of the teachers' salaries in the Church's.

Where the two bodies of law have conflicted, the civil side has moved. A consultative referendum on 28 May 2011 approved the introduction of divorce, and the legislation passed later that year. Maltese law recognises both civil and canonical marriage, and annulments granted by the ecclesiastical and civil courts are unrelated proceedings.

The parish is where the calendar is set. Every locality keeps a festa for its patron saint, with band marches, fireworks and street decoration, and UNESCO added the practice to its representative list of intangible cultural heritage in 2023. The sung folk tradition of l-għana went on the same list in 2021 and the flattened sourdough loaf known as ftira in 2020.

What the islands sell to the rest of Europe

Nominal output was 23.1 billion euros in 2024 on the IMF's figures, with GDP per head of 45,167 dollars that year and 49,277 dollars in 2025. Real growth was 6.8% in 2024 and an estimated 3.9% in 2025, unemployment 2.5% in 2025 and consumer price inflation 2.4%. General government debt stood at 46.9% of output in 2025, and the European Commission expects it to settle at around 46% over its forecast horizon.

What is being sold is services. The Commission attributes the performance to recreational, professional, information technology and financial services, with a large surplus on services trade outweighing the deficit on trade in goods. An English-speaking jurisdiction inside the eurozone, whose company law can be read by every counterparty without translation, is the part of the British inheritance the present economy is built on.

Growth has also been bought with people. Net migration ran at 1.8% of the population in 2025, and the resident population rose from 553,000 in 2024 to 563,000 in 2025. One line of business was closed by a court: Malta began granting citizenship in January 2014 in return for a contribution of 650,000 euros plus investment, and on 29 April 2025 the European Court of Justice ruled that it may no longer sell citizenship through that scheme. Malta: economy sets out what the growth model rests on and where its limits are being reached.

Who comes and what the visitors find

Inbound tourists numbered 4,022,310 in 2025, 12.9% more than in 2024, and they spent 25.4 million nights on the islands at an average stay of 6.3 nights. That is arithmetic worth holding next to the resident figures above, because it is the same 316 square kilometres, the same water supply and the same roads in both cases.

Three properties are inscribed on the World Heritage List: the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, a burial complex cut into the rock and reached by timed booking; the city of Valletta; and the megalithic temples on Malta and Gozo. The seasons do most of the sorting, since more than three quarters of the rain falls between October and March and the summer is dry. Malta: travel sets out the year, the ferries and what a visitor meets on Gozo and Comino.

Each layer named at the top has its own article underneath this one: the rulers who arrived and left in Malta: history, the language and the parish year in Malta: culture, the Westminster machinery in Malta: politics, and the rock, the money and the visiting in Malta: geography, Malta: economy and Malta: travel.