St. Barbara Bastion
Harbour-facing bastion once run by the gunners' brotherhood, lined with trees and period houses.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to St. Barbara Bastion in Valletta is about the men who worked its guns rather than the knights who built it: the bombardiers, the artillery brotherhood that ran this stretch of the harbour wall under the Order of Saint John. It follows their patron saint, their church on the old Strada Reale and the December feast they marked in their own trade's language. Along the way it lingers on the parapet trees, the houses behind you and an unconfirmed story about ice from Sicily. Best heard at the parapet, facing the Grand Harbour.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Saluting Battery
Working gun platform below a garden terrace, firing restored cannon across the harbour every day.
Fort St Angelo
Waterfront citadel, once the Knights' headquarters, that held out through a sixteenth-century siege.
Fort St Elmo and the National War Museum
Star-shaped sixteenth-century fort that bore the Great Siege's first assault, now a military history museum.
Birgu Waterfront
Restored harbourside promenade of yachts, galley-era palaces and a castle-fronted Victorian naval bakery.
Fortifications Interpretation Centre
Sixteenth-century storehouse turned museum of military architecture, with detailed fortress models.
Mdina Gate
Baroque stone gateway of seventeen twenty-four on a lion-guarded bridge into a walled hilltop city.