Gozo

• 1. Introduction

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  Gozo sits roughly 6 km northwest of Malta, a small oval of limestone that covers about 67 square kilometres - nearly the same footprint as Manhattan. Known in antiquity as Gaulos, and called Għawdex in Maltese, the island has carried multiple names across multiple millennia. Farmers from Sicily arrived around 5000 BC. The Carthaginians built a temple here. The Romans minted coins with its name on them. Crusading knights received it as a gift from a Holy Roman Emperor. And in 1551, the Ottomans arrived and emptied it almost entirely of people.

  Today, roughly 39,000 people live on Gozo, and they call themselves Gozitans. They share a republic with Malta but maintain a distinct identity - one shaped by centuries of isolation, invasion, and an extraordinary rivalry between two opera houses that has been compared to an arms race. The island's temples are among the oldest free-standing structures on earth. A limestone arch that drew visitors from around the world collapsed in 2017. And a debate about whether to connect the island to Malta by tunnel or bridge has never fully been resolved.

  What made Gozo so important to so many different civilisations across so many thousands of years - and what does it look like today?

• 2. Ancient Foundations

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  Around 5000 BC, the earliest settlers crossed the sea from Sicily, likely from the region around Agrigento, based on shared pottery styles found at sites from the Għar Dalam phase. They are thought to have sheltered first in caves on the outskirts of what is now the village of San Lawrenz. What they built next has lasted longer than almost anything else made by human hands.

  The Ġgantija temples, constructed during the Neolithic period, rank among the world's oldest free-standing structures and are also considered the world's oldest religious structures. In Maltese, the name means "belonging to the giants" - because local folklore held that no ordinary person could have moved such stones. The Xagħra Stone Circle, also Neolithic, adds to the island's remarkable archaeological density.

  Ancient Greek writers, including Euhemerus and Callimachus, argued that Gozo was the island Homer described as Ogygia, home of the nymph Calypso. Diodorus Siculus noted that the island possessed many well harbours. Coins bearing a Greek inscription point to a period of Greek influence, and the island was most probably annexed by Rome around 218 BC. By the 1st century BC, Gozo was minting its own bronze coins - featuring the head of Astarte with a crescent on one side, and on the other, a warrior, a star, and the legend Gaulitōn.

• 3. Conquest and Catastrophe

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  In 1530, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V granted both Malta and Gozo to the Knights Hospitaller as a military holding in the Mediterranean. The arrangement lasted until one of the most devastating raids in the island's recorded history.

  In July 1551, an Ottoman fleet commanded by Sinan Pasha and the corsair Dragut descended on Gozo. The raiders enslaved most of the island's population, which then numbered around 5,000 people, and transported them to Tarhuna Wa Msalata in Libya. They left through the port of Mġarr ix-Xini. The island was left nearly empty. The Knights of Malta eventually oversaw its repopulation between 1565 and 1580, drawing settlers from mainland Malta.

  Gozo's fate remained intertwined with Malta's until a brief interruption at the close of the 18th century. After Napoleon's conquest of Malta, Gozitans rose against the French garrison. The garrison surrendered to the British on the 28th of October 1798, under Captain Alexander Ball. Gozo then governed itself independently for nearly two years, until the French in Valletta finally capitulated on the 4th of September 1800. On that day, both islands became a British Protectorate, and later a Crown colony in 1813.

• 4. Self-Governance Experiments

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  On the 14th of April 1961, the Gozo Civic Council was created - the first formal experiment in local civil government on either island since Gozo's short period of autonomy between 1798 and 1800. The council was authorised to raise taxes, though it never exercised that power.

  The power it never used became the weapon used against it. When the Malta Labour Party came to office in 1971, it faced a Gozo council whose support it lacked and whose existence complicated its preference for centralised administration. The party emphasised the unused tax-raising authority in public campaigning, framing the council as a potential burden on residents. In the 1973 referendum, 76.97% of voters chose to abolish the Gozo Civic Council.

  Attempts to create a successor body in the mid-1980s initially stalled. A Gozo committee, to be chaired by the prime minister and composed of Gozitan members of Parliament, was proposed but took shape only in 1987 as a full Ministry of Gozo. That ministry was then demoted to a parliamentary secretariat between 1996 and 1998. Local government returned more durably in 1993 with the introduction of local councils across 14 Gozitan localities - the same fourteen that continue to govern the island today.

• 5. Faith and Rivalry

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  Gozo holds its own Latin bishopric, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Gozo, which is the only suffragan of the Metropolitan Archbishop of Malta. Catholic church life organises much of daily existence on the island, from the tolling of bells for the canonical hours - Matins, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, and Vespers - to the annual feast days that honour each village's patron saint.

  The Rotunda of Xewkija, in the village of Xewkija, holds 3,000 people - enough to seat the entire village population. Its dome is larger than the dome of St Paul's Cathedral in London. The sanctuary of Ta' Pinu, near the village of Għarb in the northwest of the island, is considered the most famous church on Gozo.

  Feast celebrations bring fireworks, live band music, horse racing in some villages, concerts, and a greasy pole competition held over water. Gozo also has two opera houses - Astra and Aurora - both owned by rival band clubs that each trace their founding to 1863. For more than a century the two have competed on every front imaginable. When Aurora learned that Astra intended to bring a horse onstage during a production of Aida, Aurora's own production of the same opera quietly assembled two horses. Locals compare the dynamic to an arms race.

• 6. The Question of Connection

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  Every year, approximately 1.1 million cars cross between Gozo and Malta by ferry. The Gozo Channel Line runs every 45 minutes in summer; a return journey takes about 25 minutes each way and costs €4.65. A separate fast ferry operated by Gozo Fast Ferry makes approximately 45-minute crossings between the Grand Harbour in Valletta and Mġarr, carrying up to 300 passengers at a top speed of 32 knots.

  The idea of a permanent road connection is decades old. A 1972 feasibility study under the Labour administration found that a bridge was physically possible but environmentally problematic, while a tunnel was judged too expensive. In 2006 an online poll by The Times of Malta found that 55% of respondents supported a road link. In June 2013, China Communications Construction Corporation Limited agreed to finance a €4 million study to assess the feasibility of a bridge or tunnel. That study found the bridge would take four years to build and cost approximately €1 billion to construct, with annual operating and maintenance costs of up to €4 million; the company proposed completing it by 2020.

  Environmentalists and organisations including Din l-Art Ħelwa and Flimkien għal Ambjent Aħjar have opposed the bridge proposal. A separate report by the Gozo Business Chamber together with Transport Malta examined an 11 km underground sub-seabed tunnel. The University of Malta conducted geological and geophysical surveys for that project, deploying a 300-metre cable fitted with specialised receptors and using a compressed-air 'air gun' to map the rock strata beneath the sea floor - with plans for borehole drilling down to 200 metres below the sea bed to follow.

• 7. On Screen and On Location

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  Gozo's limestone landscape and Mediterranean light have drawn filmmakers since the early 1950s. In 1953 it stood in for 'Resolution Island' in the film Single-Handed, based on C. S. Forester's novel Brown on Resolution; the semi-circular Dwejra Bay, sheltered behind Fungus Rock on the island's west coast, played the role of the fictional harbour where a German ship is held at bay.

  In 1969, Anthony Newley directed beach scenes of Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? at Ramla Bay, with Joan Collins in the cast. Kevin Connor's 1978 film Warlords of Atlantis, starring Doug McClure, was shot in Marsalforn Bay. In 1981, two days of shooting in Gozo's strong Mediterranean light produced footage representing an alien planet's surface for the British horror film Inseminoid. That same year, parts of Episode 7 of the television series Brideshead Revisited were filmed in Kerċem to represent Fez in Morocco.

  In 1997, Gozo served as Calypso's island in the Hallmark miniseries The Odyssey. Dwejra, already familiar from the Azure Window, was among the Maltese locations used in the 2011 HBO series Game of Thrones. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt filmed portions of By the Sea at Mġarr ix-Xini from August to November 2014 - the same harbour from which the Ottoman fleet departed in 1551. The British series The Madame Blanc Mysteries has filmed on the island continuously since 2021.