Seven days in Malta: a country you can cross in an hour and still not finish

The airport is fifteen minutes from the city gate and the bus drops you at the terminus outside it, so you are inside the walls almost before you have registered arriving. Walk in through the gap in the bastion, which was cut open rather than roofed when the entrance was rebuilt to a Renzo Piano design, and up Republic Street.

Then find the Upper Barrakka Gardens on the southern wall. Below you is the Grand Harbour, one of the deepest natural harbours in the Mediterranean, with the fortified peninsulas of the Three Cities on the far side and tankers turning in the middle of it. This is the view that explains why everybody who has ever had a navy wanted this island.

Below the gardens is a working gun battery that fires at noon and at four, six days a week, with a short piece of theatre before each round. Time the first afternoon for the four o'clock and you get the harbour with the light on it as well.

Be at St John's for opening. Outside it is a bare fortress of a church with two square towers; inside, every surface is carved, gilded or painted, and the floor is a continuous carpet of marble tomb slabs over the knights buried beneath. In the oratory hangs Caravaggio's Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, painted here in 1608, the largest canvas he made and the only one he signed.

Five minutes up the street, the archaeology museum holds what came out of the temples: the small reclining figure known as the Sleeping Lady, the heavy seated statues, tools of flint and obsidian carried in by sea. Seeing these before the sites turns the sites from fields of stone into something legible.

The Grand Master's Palace closes the day. It has been the seat of whoever ran Malta since the 1570s, through the knights, the British and the republic, and the armoury under it holds enough plate for an army.

Malta has two sieges and today is about both. Start underground: the tunnels below the Upper Barrakka were the British headquarters through the bombing of 1940 to 1942 and later for the landings in Sicily, and they are kept with the plotting tables and the switchboards in place. They are also cold, which in August matters.

Then walk the length of Republic Street to Fort St Elmo on the point. In 1565 the Ottoman commanders decided to take this fort first; it held for a month and everybody inside it was killed, which cost the besiegers the summer and saved the rest of the island. The National War Museum inside carries the story on to the George Cross awarded to the whole island in 1942.

Finish across the water. The ferry from below the Barrakka takes about five minutes, and Senglea on the far side is three parallel lanes of tall houses with steps between them and washing overhead, the most densely populated municipality in Europe. At the point is a small stone lookout carved with a giant eye and a giant ear, so anyone coming up the harbour understood they were being watched.

One day in the sea. Malta is mostly rock and most Maltese swim off it, but the north has the sand, and Ghadira below Mellieha is the widest of the beaches, with water that stays shallow a very long way out. Take the bus from the Valletta terminus and be there before the middle of the morning.

Behind the beach is a shallow lagoon kept as a bird reserve, with something like a hundred and forty migrating species passing through in a year and hides at the edge of the water. It is a quiet hour in the shade after a morning of glare.

End on the ridge above. The red painted watchtower north of the village was built by the knights to watch this stretch of coast, and from the roof you can see Comino, the channel and the whole south shore of Gozo, which is where you are going tomorrow.

Mdina sits on the highest ground in the middle of the island and was the capital for two thousand years before the knights moved everything down to the harbour. About three hundred people still live inside the walls, cars are almost entirely banned, and by evening it is quiet enough that the nickname, the Silent City, stops sounding like marketing.

The cathedral was rebuilt by Lorenzo Gafà after the earthquake of 1693 flattened the old one, and is the best piece of Maltese Baroque outside Valletta. The museum opposite comes with the same ticket and holds Dürer woodcuts, which nobody expects.

The natural history museum, in an eighteenth century palace on the square, is old fashioned in the good way: Maltese geology, fossils out of the local limestone, cases of birds. Then walk the bastion wall at the far end for the view down to the sea, and eat in Rabat outside the gate.

Give Gozo the whole day. The crossing takes about twenty five minutes and the island on the other side is greener, emptier and noticeably less hurried than Malta, with terraced fields and a church tower on every ridge.

Victoria in the middle is built under a walled hill, and the Cittadella on top of it can be walked right around the perimeter for a view over the entire island in one turn. The cathedral inside has a flat ceiling painted to look like a dome that was never built, and it works from the right spot on the floor.

Then Ġgantija, above the village of Xagħra. The two temples there went up between about 3600 and 3200 BC, which makes them older than Stonehenge and older than the pyramids, and the blocks in the outer wall are so large the Gozitans long assumed giants had put them there. The Azure Window on the west coast, which used to be the other reason people came, fell into the sea in 2017, so do not go looking for it.

One last piece of prehistory on the way out. Tarxien is four linked temples in a suburban street about ten minutes from the runway, built and rebuilt between roughly 3600 and 2500 BC, with spiral carved slabs, reliefs of animals and the lower half of a colossal skirted figure that was once several times life size.

It takes an hour with the audio guide, and it makes much more sense having seen the carvings and the figures in the archaeology museum earlier in the week.

The airport is a few minutes further on, so the only thing this costs is an earlier breakfast.