St George's Bay's public tourism school is now a Hard Rock Hotel, vertical gardens to follow
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'.
For decades the Institute of Tourism Studies sat on the St George’s Bay waterfront, a public campus where the island trained the next generation to welcome visitors with a smile. The lessons are over. In their place rises the City Centre, a 300 million euro lifestyle destination, and the welcoming will from now on be handled by professionals, by the night.
The real thing, franchised
Where the island once taught hospitality for nothing, a Hard Rock Hotel will shortly sell it back: getting on for four hundred rooms, twenty-five suites with their own private pools, and a guitar in a glass case to remind everyone what authenticity used to look like. The old school trained students to make a guest feel at home. Its replacement makes you feel at home on the very spot, for a nightly rate, beneath a framed souvenir of somebody else’s heritage entirely.
Vertical gardens, best admired from outside
The two residential towers, sold as ORA Residences, arrive in the brochure as “vertical gardens,” and we applaud the ambition. Pembroke, long short of green space, is to receive an entire garden, simply stood on its end, wrapped in glass and parcelled out by the apartment. Call it the island’s answer to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, only opaque, privately owned, and turned to face the other way. The greenery, like the sea view, comes included in the render.
There will be more of it. Before the towers had even topped out, the developer asked to grow them taller and was granted seven further floors on one and six on the other. Most buildings stop at the height they were given. These prefer to keep gardening upward. The residents of Pembroke, treated to a fresh storey most weeks, enjoy a close view of the cultivation and a shrinking one of the sky.
Photo: James Bianchi/MaltaToday A City Centre, privately owned
Anchoring the whole arrangement is the centrepiece every town dreams of: a shopping mall and a supermarket, on land that used to belong to everyone. The national auditor valued the public plot at around 67 million euro; it changed hands for comfortably less, after a public call for offers that drew, in the end, a single offer. A court threw out the first permit in 2019. The project came back, was approved all over again, and the courts have since confirmed it. Persistence is the one thing on this site in genuinely endless supply.
Photo: James Bianchi/MaltaToday Plan your visit
The hotel and the mall open this year, the towers and their gardens soon after. The Institute spent decades teaching the island how to make visitors welcome. Its replacement has sharpened the lesson to a single line: welcome them warmly, charge them by the night, the apartment and the trolley, and keep the garden on the inside.
