Malta travel guide - when to go, what to see, what it costs

Two nights gets you Valletta and an evening in Mdina, and that is a good short trip, but it leaves out most of what makes Malta worth the flight. The third night buys the Three Cities across the Grand Harbour plus either the megalithic temples in the south or Marsaxlokk on a Sunday morning. The fourth buys Gozo. Three or four nights is the trip we would book, and unusually for a country, four nights genuinely covers it.

Give Gozo a whole day rather than half of one; the ferry options are in the transport section below, and the fast boat from Valletta is what makes the day trip work from a city base. A full week only makes sense if you split it and sleep on Gozo for the second half. That is a slower, emptier holiday than Malta itself offers, and it is the right call for some people and far too quiet for others.

Winter is the strongest case for Malta and the one most people miss. Average daytime highs are around 16C in January and February, about 17C in December and 21C in November. The islands get roughly 3,000 hours of sunshine a year, and even December averages about 160 hours of it, which is more than northern Europe manages in three winter months put together. The trade is rain: almost all of the year's 580 to 600 millimetres falls between October and February, with December and January the wettest. A February trip is bright jacket weather with the occasional washout day, and the stone towns, the churches and the museums are all better when they are not 32C outside.

If you want to swim, the sea decides your dates rather than the air. Mean sea temperature runs about 21C in June, 24C in July, 26C in August and 25C in September, and it is still around 23C in October, so the comfortable swimming season is roughly June to October. July and August are the other extreme: daytime highs of 31 to 32C, effectively no rain at all in July, no shade in the middle of a limestone town, and the island at its fullest. If you can avoid those two months, avoid them. April, May and October give you 20 to 25C by day and a fraction of the crowds.

Summer is also festa season, which is either the reason to come or the reason to stay away. Around 95 village feasts on Malta and about 10 on Gozo run from May to September, each with band marches, the statue of the patron saint carried through the streets, and fireworks that go on well past midnight. The peak is 15 August, Santa Marija, celebrated in nine or more localities at once. Out of season, two dates are worth planning around: Carnival in the week before Ash Wednesday, usually February, with parades in Valletta and a stranger, darker unofficial version at Nadur on Gozo, and the Good Friday processions on both islands, with life-size statues carried behind hooded penitents. In 2027 Ash Wednesday falls on 10 February and Good Friday on 26 March.

Then there is the part a travel guide cannot answer and we can. On the route charted below, the cheapest months we have measured are November, December and January. Late winter sits a step above them, and early autumn is the most expensive stretch in the data so far. That is a genuinely lucky alignment for anyone flexible: the cheapest flights we can see fall exactly in the mild, bright, uncrowded winter window that Malta is good at, so the cheap trip and the pleasant trip are the same trip. We have measured eight months on this route and nothing past March, so we will not tell you anything about late spring or next summer. For the other version of a winter-sun weekend, with a bigger city attached, see the Malaga guide.

Malta International Airport is the only airport in the country. It sits at Gudja, on the site of the wartime RAF Luqa airfield, about 5 kilometres southwest of Valletta, and a taxi into the capital takes roughly 20 minutes outside the rush, which runs about 06:00 to 08:30 and 16:30 to 18:30. Every arrival to the country lands in the same place: Gozo's heliport has had no scheduled flights since 2006.

Buses are the only public transport on land. The network is strongly radial: the numbered routes begin at the terminus outside Valletta's City Gate, with secondary hubs at the airport, Bugibba, Cirkewwa and Victoria on Gozo. That geometry is the honest drawback of moving around here. Two places on opposite sides of the island are often fastest to connect by riding into Valletta and back out, and in July and August a bus that is already full will pass your stop without opening the doors. Budget more time than the distance suggests, especially for anything that has to connect with a ferry.

Water beats road for three journeys. The Gozo car ferry crosses Cirkewwa to Mgarr in about 25 minutes, as often as every half hour during the day and through the night as well, and tickets are validated only on the Gozo side, so you sail across without paying and buy the ticket for the way back. The fast passenger ferry links Valletta's Grand Harbour with Mgarr in under 45 minutes, foot passengers only. And in the harbours themselves the Valletta to Sliema and Valletta to Three Cities ferries cut out a long road detour around the creeks, running daily with later hours from 1 June to 31 October.

Start with pastizzi, the national snack: a diamond of flaky pastry filled either with ricotta or with mushy peas, sold hot from a pastizzeria or a corner bar and eaten standing up, often for breakfast. They are the cheapest thing you will buy on the islands and one of the best. Ftira is the other everyday staple, a ring of leavened Maltese bread split and filled with tuna or sardines, potato, tomato, onion, capers and olives, on the UNESCO intangible heritage list since 2020.

The national dish is stuffat tal-fenek, rabbit stewed slowly in wine and garlic. A fenkata is the full communal version, usually pasta with the sauce first and the rabbit after, and it is worth booking one in an inland village rather than ordering a single portion on a promenade. Look out too for gbejniet, the small sheep or goat cheeselets particularly associated with Gozo, and imqaret, hot date-filled pastries sold from vans. For fish, go to Marsaxlokk and eat what the harbour landed.

One piece of advice rather than a verdict: the restaurant strips along the seafront in Sliema and St Julian's are built for passing trade, and the menus there converge on the same international list you could eat anywhere in Europe. Walk a street or two inland, or go to a village, and both the cooking and the prices improve.

Malta has one airport, so there is no cheaper alternative field to weigh up and no coach transfer to price in. What moves the number is the month, and the chart higher up this page shows how much: the swing across the eight months we have measured is larger than anything a day-of-week trick will find you. Below is the cheapest one-way we have measured into MLA from each origin we track, each with the day we saw it. If you are starting from Lithuania, the ranked list in cheapest flights from Vilnius puts Malta next to everything else we price from there.