Gozo Rocks

We seem to be establishing a pattern here: 1. go to a place we’ve barely heard of with a plan to stay a couple of days. 2. Get caught by a boat malfunction or bad weather. 3. End up staying for a few weeks, with the positive side being that we get to really explore the place properly. Well, that has happened again here in Gozo, Malta’s smaller sister island just a little to the north west.

Santa Marija Tower

 

We sailed over here on a pleasant day and wandered around the coast a bit looking for a good anchorage. St Niklaws Bay on the tiny island of Comino (between Malta and Gozo) offered the best protection from the wind, so we settled in there and spent the next day checking out Comino Island. There isn’t a lot to it, apart from the spectacular views of the other islands and the famous Blue Lagoon, which is indeed very blue. We hiked up to the Santa Marija watchtower, the “guardian of the Gozo Channel”, built by the Knights of St John in 1618 as part of the system of inter-communicating towers across the Maltese Islands. The main role of these towers was to guard against the very real threat of Turkish invaders and Corsair pirates. In 1551, the formidable Turkish admiral Dragut Reis had carried off virtually the entire population of Gozo (about 5000 people) as slaves. The tower has been beautifully restored and is well worth a visit. Apparently it came at an environmental price, however: Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt originally paid for it by selling all the wood on Comino, which is now nothing but limestone heath, sustaining a population of four.

At one time several farming families lived on Comino, and, in keeping with Malta’s identity as ‘more Catholic than the Pope’, they had their own church. When the weather was too bad for the priest to cross the channel, Mass was conducted through a system of semaphore flags from the church in Mgarr.

Dwejra

Well, for us the wind arrived on cue with worse to come, so we headed over to Mgarr, Gozo’s fishing harbour, ferry port and marina. The marina is a work in progress, but it’s really nice and will be even better when all the work is finished. The staff are particularly helpful docking boats and ensuring that everyone is safe when the weather turns ugly. As I write, it is so ugly that nothing is visible from our boat – the air is completely whitish-pink with sand – where normally you can see for miles across to Comino and Malta (I don’t know how the Comino Catholics would manage Mass under these conditions – bells or foghorns perhaps?) We’ve been told to expect winds upwards of 50 knots, so everything is battened down.

Onto my rock theme. People say that rocks are Malta’s only natural resource, and Gozo is similar, though it does have some pretty farmland in the valleys between the rocks, and Gozo is famed for cheese, tomatoes, honey, capers and wine. The most eye-catching rock is the beautiful honey-gold globerina limestone. It is soft enough to be carved easily, as demonstrated by the facades of many homes both old and new, and especially by the churches. Of course this also means that it weathers quite quickly, so many old carvings have lost their definition. Nature too is a great sculptor of stone on these islands.

Walls in the Citadel, carved by the wind

Typical house front stonework

 

Stonemasonry must be a kind of instinct for Maltese. When we went to have a look at the famous red sand beach at San Blas, it was blowing a howling gale. But there on the beach, groups of sunbathers had built themselves neat little dry-stone windbreaks. Gozo must have thousands of kilometres of rubble walls interlaced across the countryside in an attempt to retain the soil. And of course stone has been used for protection too – so it’s not surprising that, when a Maltese bloke sees a rock he has a strong urge to put it on top of another rock.

Sunbathing fort at San Blas

Then there are the most mysterious and fascinating rocks of all – those of the Ggantija temples, largest of Malta’s megalithic ruins with some stones over 6 metres high. These are the oldest known free-standing structures in the world, dating from 3600 BC. Very little is known about the people who worshipped at the carved stone altars, but you can stand there on the crest of the hill overlooking most of Gozo and try to imagine someone doing the same thing back in the dawn of human history.

Ggantija temple