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Keep Yourself Updated
Dispatches from across the islands. The news is always developing.
A photograph of a crumbling, hole-punched structural column on a building still going up is travelling the islands. The internet calls it a scandal; the brochure calls it a daring new finish, included at no extra cost.
The island's only Streamline Moderne building kept the RAF's Spitfires flying and rose from the bombs that took its predecessor. Now it is rewarded, on top, with 31 storeys and the five underground floors of parking the car spent a lifetime without.
The permit said preserve 'the majority of the existing façades.' They are entirely gone, so the project has applied for permission to have demolished them, and grown two floors in the process.
The site is designated public open space, but the government, as owner of the sea, has graciously consented to a private pool, sun deck and two restaurants taking it off the public's hands.
For thirty-five years the old Savoy showed Valletta the pictures. Spared the grim fate of becoming a museum, it reopens instead as a 60-room hotel above the supermarket, joining a capital already filling, floor by floor, with hotels.
An excavator has begun clearing an old farmhouse for apartments beside the 5,500-year-old temple, on a heritage boundary that turned out to be wherever the architects needed it.
A palazzo named after the 17th-century aqueduct tower across the road would keep its front wall and surrender its interior, its garden and its skyline to a five-storey block, planning permitting.
The Knights' mightiest fortress now moonlights as a film set and festival venue, a UNESCO contender for nearly thirty years, with a sea view it is slowly becoming part of.
The ground at Ta' Qali shrugged off more than 800 tons of Luftwaffe bombs. A 13,000 square metre rubble installation, after a decade of enforcement, is undone instead by a clipboard.
Built on a backfilled quarry, the islands' most thrilling new address keeps every visitor admirably in the present moment.
When the islands run low on dry land, the sport simply takes to the water, on a barge filed, correctly, as Outside Development Zone.
Gozo lands a coveted European podium finish, a 10,000 euro cheque, and a fort built so the island could never be carried off again, now closing to the public on schedule.
The public campus that trained Malta to welcome visitors is now a 300 million euro Hard Rock Hotel, a private mall and two towers of luxury flats marketed as 'vertical gardens'.
A new north-coast residence proves you can still own a piece of the nation's protected shoreline, no permit required, with a loyalty scheme that pays for itself.
The island's oldest transport infrastructure, the protected cart ruts above the Grand Harbour, will finally get the parking it always lacked: three excavated floors of it, under 27 new apartments.
Forget the Louvre. Sliema's streets have quietly assembled the most ambitious immersive art collection in Europe, and admission is gloriously free.
A visionary hotel development has gifted the promenade an immersive aquatic experience, and the authorities simply cannot cope with how much fun everyone is having.
Fourteen pool-equipped bungalows have been approved on an Area of Ecological Importance, a protected seabird colony and a slice of Natura 2000, in a triumph of higher-quality rural design.
The future national park unveils its first attraction: a floodlit thirty-court padel complex delivered so enthusiastically that two thirds of it arrived before the permission.
A 2,000-year-old burial chamber has secured a rare in-situ position, snugly between the garages and the apartments, with no public access to spoil the exclusivity.
The heritage watchdog asked for the early-20th-century factory to be preserved and integrated. It has been integrated, thoroughly, as hardcore under the new foundations.
The 19th-century façade has been carefully dismantled and re-erected on a fashionable new alignment, where it now enjoys the warm embrace of several extra storeys.
