Fort Chambray celebrates a proud podium on Europe's most-endangered list, beating a Hungarian watermill

Gozo has done it again. This year the British Barracks at Fort Chambray were named one of Europe’s 7 Most Endangered heritage sites, an honour Europa Nostra hands to just seven places on the entire continent. Fourteen were preselected. Seven made the final cut. Our barracks placed, and we could not be prouder.

The competition was, frankly, not close. We saw off a watermill in Hungary, a gunpowder factory in Portugal, and the oldest brewery in the Balkans, none of which, we are obliged to point out, arrived at the ceremony with a five-star aparthotel and 319 underground parking spaces already signed off on top of them. To be endangered is one thing. To be endangered with a board approval, a rejected appeal, and a public piazza in the renders is another league entirely.

The accolade comes with a 10,000 euro grant, paid toward the upkeep of a building that the 2024 permit clears to demolish up to 85 percent of. Every euro counts, and at that ratio each one will be asked to do the work of a great many euros. The list has recognised 77 sites across 35 countries since 2013, and we are thrilled to confirm we are the only one of them currently scheduled for 105 residences.

The island that was carried off

To understand the gift, you must understand the wait. In July 1551 a corsair fleet descended on Gozo and carried off approximately 6,000 of its people into slavery, very nearly emptying the island of its entire population. The Cittadella held perhaps a few hundred souls; almost everyone else was taken. For a generation Gozo was a place that had been removed.

So the Order set about making sure the island could never be carried off again. Two centuries later, from 1749, the Knights raised Fort Chambray on the headland above Mġarr harbour: a fortified refuge for the Gozitan population, star-shaped bastions facing the open sea, the whole point of it that the people inside could not be reached. It was, by some accounts, the only fortified town the Order ever completed from scratch in Gozo. A safe place. The safest the island had.

Built so the island could never be emptied, now emptied on schedule

Here the story reaches its happy ending. The refuge raised so that no fleet could ever again strip the headland of its people is being relieved, at last, of its people. The approved scheme delivers 105 luxury residences, a 114-room five-star aparthotel (64 ensuite rooms and 50 serviced apartments, for those keeping the tally), and 319 underground parking spaces, the entire arrangement sealed behind a single discreet gate. The headland that once kept Gozo’s whole population safely inside will shortly keep the public reliably outside. The corsairs took two centuries to repel. The fob does it in a tap.

After 277 years the fort returns to active service, defending the island at last from its own residents, the occasional day-tripper, and the harsh threat of unobstructed coastal views. Killjoys note that the headland could simply be returned to public ownership, like the forts it stands among, and left open for anyone to walk. We find this deeply unambitious. A view that anyone can reach is no view at all.

A barracks, beautifully relocated

Conservation has come a long way. Rather than leave the British-era barracks standing out in the weather, the plan dismantles the distinctive two-storey façade and re-erects it at the back of the site, folded neatly into the new hotel. The barracks were a textbook example of nineteenth-century British military architecture, a witness, the heritage people say, to three hundred years of the island’s military and social story, and, by some accounts, the first overseas married quarters built anywhere in the Commonwealth. They will now be the first to come with a residents-only pool. Think of it as a Piranesi ruin brought thoughtfully up to code: the romantic façade preserved exactly as found, then issued a lift core, a lobby, and climate control.

PLAN YOUR VISIT: the barracks remain on view this season, weather and contractors permitting. As Europe’s heritage community has now confirmed in writing, there has never been a better time to see them. Preferably soon.