Malta has an explosion of churches, like a honey hive of holiness swarming over all the villages of the two key islands. The honey has attracted lots of Irish wedding couple looking for a Knight to remember.
There are nearly 400 churches in Malta, one at every turn of the road.
Always most prominent building along the landscape is the parish church. This place has three times as many churches as pubs, the Irish eye will quickly gather.
The church wedding is still important to a lot of Irish people and Malta with its easy bureaucracy and three day residency, the civil function’s close relationship with the church wedding, and preponderance of churches and good hotels makes a nice wedding destination.
It also can save a lot of money. A wedding in Malta will set you back an average of Eu4,500, compared with the average of Eu23,000 at home.
The variety is enormous. Plates can come in at Eu15 with some good options at Eu30.
There are close cultural, economic and religious connections. One of the oldest traditional wedding venue hotels, the Phoenician, is Irish owned.
There are over 300 restaurants as well and everybody has decided to chase the wedding business. You can get married in a vineyard (Ta Mena Estate in Gozo), a historic palace (Palazzo Parisio, Naxxar) or even underwater (a Chinese couple did it at the Azure Window in Dwejra, an impressive natural arch standing some twenty metres high).
The advertisements for Malta depict its nice beaches Ghajan-Tuffieha with its famous reddish sand or Ramla Il-Hamra in Gozo.
But don’t take it that you are heading for a Med version of the Caribbean. Malta is a citybreak.
There are 420,000 people living on an island half the size of County Louth.
It means that the 54 villages on Malta and 14 on Gozo are within a few fields of joining up with each other.
It also means traffic. The small roads are full of cars, nearly one per head of population.
The famous old buses are gone, consigned to the postcard stalls, but the new transportation system is having teething problems, so allow some extra time for that airport transfer.
Expectedly for such an ancient island, there is lots of culture to be found.
St Paul’s catacombs lurk under the modern streets, the funerary picnic sites as gloomy as they ever were.
The Phoenicians rolled through, followed by the Greeks and the Romans and the Arabs whose place names still dot the island and whose words perforate the language, the Normans were followed by the Knights, chosen form the aristocracy of Europe they brought their best architects and engaged in competitive palace building.
Caravaggio’s finest painting of all, the largest and the only one with a signature, is in St John the Baptist cathedral.
The Beheading of John the Baptist is the keynote of the Knights of Malta’s multi-faceted construction as ever but the big change in recent years is the way the paintings in the Blessed Host Chapel at the other side of the building have been restored.
Romance comes with all this history. There are terrific wine estates to be visited.
Maltese folk music is easily accessible and enjoyable, for the real thing have a listen to Claudio Baglioni singing Wied Ghasel U Jien and shed a romantic tear.
Before you depart for home trip upstairs to Club 22 for a drink with a view and down to Barcelona, and a trip along the strip in Paceville. where the raucous ribaldry would leave Ayia Napa behind.
Malta of the 400 churches now has seven gentlemen’s clubs. Some people call it progress.
What’s hot
Everything within easy reach, start a tour of the signature attractions with Mdina and finish with the west-facing cliffs at Dingli at sundown.
Good hotels, check out the five star luxury at the Radisson Blu hotel on a headland with three pools strategically positioned to catch each ray of the evening sun.
The fascinating Eu4.65 return ferry journey to Gozo
What’s Not
While access is good the choice is limited to Ryanair with the pesky baggage restrictions. In Malta the ground handlers are incentivised to find passengers whose bags don’t fit the cage, not ideal for great aunt Mary’s blood pressure.
Crowds. Malta is an overcrowded island, with 420,000 people living on an island that is half the size of county Louth.
