Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1546437
10 gozotoday | FRIDAY • 4 SEPTEMBER 2026 CULTURE How many days do you need in Gozo? A day trip to Gozo only scratches the surface. From ancient temples and dramatic cliffs to village festas, opera, diving and long dinners, staying a few nights reveals an island best explored slowly A day trip to Gozo shows you glimpses of the island. Stay a few days and the island opens up. Ask almost anyone who has holidayed in Malta wheth- er they have been to Gozo, and they will say yes. Ask how long they stayed, and the answer is nearly always the same. A day. Usually a good day, too. Ġgantija in the morning, the Ċittadella before lunch, a swim if the timing allowed, and back across the channel to main- land Malta by evening. No- body comes away disappoint- ed. What they do say, often, is that they wish they had known. Not known about Gozo, which they had, but known enough at the point of booking to have set aside a few nights for it rather than just a few hours of the day. By the time the is- land makes that case for itself, the accommodation is already paid for on the other side of the channel. So it is worth making the case earlier. Look at what a single day ac- tually asks of you. A temple older than the pyramids, a for- tified city on a hill, and a swim in one of the cleanest stretches of water in the Mediterranean, all three folded into the hours between two crossings, with a clock running quietly behind them. Whatever you do, you do it with one eye on the time. You choose between Ramla and Dwejra, because there is no room for both, and which- ever you choose you are back in the car within the hour. Stay a few nights and nothing has to be squeezed. Ġgantija gets a morning of its own, with time for the visitor centre and the finds it holds, and time to stand among the stones long enough for their age to regis- ter. The Ċittadella gets anoth- er. And the swim stops being a single decision. Ramla one day for the red sand, then the narrow inlet at Wied l-Għasri, the shingle at Dahlet Qorrot, the flat rocks at Għar Qawq- la where the water is deep straight off the edge. Each is a different kind of swim, and none of them is a compromise for having missed the others. That is the first half of the difference. The second is that Gozo has a second half to its day, and it begins at roughly the hour most visitors leave. Begin where the day ends. Along the south coast the cliffs at Ta' Ċenċ and Sanap fall more than a hundred me- tres to open sea, with nothing between you and the horizon but air, and both are fine plac- es to watch the sun setting on another day. But Dwejra is the one to plan for. It faces west, so the sun does not simply fade there, it goes down into the water behind the Fungus Rock, and the picturesque Inland Sea turns from turquoise to what- ever colour the sky decides on. A few minutes inland from Dwejra, on the same western side of the island, Ta' Pinu stands alone in the fields at Għarb, its bell tower visible from half the island. Go once in daylight, and give it proper time. The miraculous painting of Our Lady is there, and be- yond it the corridors of ex voto offerings, photographs and ob- jects left by people recording answered prayers, each with a story attached to it. It is among the most moving rooms in the Maltese Islands, and hurrying it would be a waste. Then go back after dark, when the basilica is floodlit against open countryside. It is closed at that hour, and it does not matter in the slight- est. The forecourt is empty, the fields silent, and a building that hums with pilgrims by day becomes, after dark, simply beautiful and entirely still. A daytrip gives you one Ta' Pinu. A few nights give you both, and they are not the same place. The same holds at the Ċitta- della. At ten in the evening you will very likely have the ram- parts to yourself, the flood- lights turning the bastion walls to hues of gold and the village churches lit one by one below you. It is worth knowing what you are standing on. In July 1551 an Ottoman force under Sinan Pasha and the corsair Dragut bombarded this for- tress for two days. The garri- son capitulated on 26 July, and between five and seven thou- sand Gozitans, the majority of the island's population, were carried off into slavery. It is one thing to experience this historical place at daytime. It is another to stand where it happened once the night has fallen and the island has gone quiet, with nothing to hear but the Cathedral bell marking the hour, and to feel that the lime- stone walls would speak if they could, and tell you everything they have stood through. Lunch on a daytrip is func- tional, and it has to be. The af- ternoon is already spoken for, there is a bay still to reach be- fore the sun sets, and the meal is fitted into a gap rather than given an hour of its own. Dinners across several nights are a different proposition. You are not choosing one Gozitan meal, you are choosing four or five, and the island has range enough to make each distinct. Menus follow the season rath- er than the tourist calendar: rabbit, capers, sheep's chee- selets, ftira from a wood-fired oven, and DOK Gozo wine from estates a few kilometres from the plate in front of you. The settings vary as much as the cooking. One evening in a village square, with little to interrupt the conversation but the church bells. Another on Cittadella by Night (Photo: Ross Magri) Ggantija (Photo: Piotr Andruszko)