After having been picked up from your hotel or the cruise terminal, you’ll depart with your guide to the southern part of Malta. Your first stop includes a visit to the Tarxien Temple, which offers a unique collection of circa 3000 B.C. sanctuaries. You can admire stone idols and tablets, domestic animal carvings, altars and screens decorated with spiral designs and other patterns, and oracular chambers.
Your tour then continues to the Hagar Qim and Mnejidra Megalithic Temples. Set in a rural area near the village of Zurrieq, this ancient temple which dates back to 3300 B.C. has the largest and heaviest megaliths of all the temple sites around the Maltese Islands. The Mnajidra Temple, less than 1 kilometer from Hagar Qim, offers unique views of the high cliffs that characterize the coast of this part of the island.
Just before the fisherman’s village of Marsaxlokk on your way back, you will discover Ghar Dalam. The Ghar Dalam Cave is a highly important site where the earliest evidence of human settlement on Malta, which dates back 7,000 years ago, was discovered. The site is a huge 80-meter cavern which is opened to visitors, and the small annexed museum contains fossil remains of animals such as hippopotamus and volatives which were found in the cave and date back to the Pleistocene era. Following this last visit, your tour will end with you being returned to your point of origin.
Any location in Malta
10 minutes before start time
A Malta Temples Tour is a must for anyone who travels to this beautiful Mediterranean island. Malta and Gozo are home to seven megalithic temples, all of which are designated as world heritage sites by UNESCO. These megalithic temples date back 5500 years ago and are the oldest free-standing stone structures in the world, even older than the Stonehenge and the Pyramids.
Three different but connected temple buildings make up the Tarxien Temples. When the entire property was restored in 1956, the main entryway was rebuilt. Many of the decorated slabs that were found on the site were moved indoors for safety at the Museum of Archaeology in Valletta at the same time. The oldest temple in Malta, which dates to roughly 3100 BC, is also the most ornately decorated.
In Maltese, Hagar Qim, which translates to “standing or worshipping stones,” is actually three constructions, the oldest of which originates from the earliest period of temple construction in Malta and roughly corresponds to the entrance of the new Sicilian colonists in 3850 BC.
In the middle of the turquoise waves of the central Mediterranean, Malta’s southern shore is home to the prehistoric Mnajdra Temples. These temples made of hard limestone, which were constructed between 3600 and 2500 B.C., are among the world’s oldest still standing free-standing constructions.
Marsaxlokk Malta’s fish market is well-known throughout the islands for being the best in the country. After all, the residents of the town are well-versed in the trade. The Phoenicians initially settled here in the 9th century BC, making it one among the country’s earliest nautical communities. Since then, the port has seen a lot of activity; in addition to the Maltese, the Ottomans, British, and French have all used it.
Visitors are invited to travel back in time at Ghar Dalam, the earliest ancient site in Malta. Italian palaeontologist Arturo Issel’s investigations in 1865 were the first to look into the cave’s Neolithic artifacts. John H. Cooke carried out an excavation in 1892. A comparable collection was transported to the British Museum, but the most of this material was housed in Malta.
