Valletta — Collachio Steps to Hastings Garden
Valletta, Malta
About this route
When to walk it
Valletta is small, walled and entirely built of limestone, which means it reflects heat. November to April is the walking season; July and August are genuinely punishing on the stairs between ten and four. The limestone is slippery for the first hour after rain and then dries almost instantly.
Numbers are estimates for the pace named above; the ground decides the rest.
Sensory anchors
Five things this ground gives you to notice. Each script paragraph ends on one of them.
- Sight Streets laid out on a grid over a ridge, with the ground falling away at both ends; from the top of a stair you see the Grand Harbour on one side and Marsamxett on the other.
- Sound Limestone reflects sound hard: two people talking at the bottom of a stair are clearly audible at the top. Church bells are frequent and close, and there is almost no traffic noise inside the walls.
- Touch The steps are limestone, pale and fine-grained, polished to a shine on the treads by four centuries of feet and slightly rough on the risers where nobody steps.
- Smell Hot limestone dust in summer, a specific damp-cellar smell from the ground floors, and bread from the few remaining bakeries inside the walls.
- Breath Eighty metres of gain in just over two kilometres, in short flights. Three paces in and five out on any flight; six and six on the flat grid streets.
Walking script
Choose a script
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Valletta was built from scratch by the Knights of St John after the 1565 siege, on a peninsula with a ridge down the middle and steep ground falling away on both sides. The result is a city where every east-west street is a slope and every north-south street is a stair. This route is 2.1 km with 80 m of climbing, nearly all of it in flights of twenty to forty steps.
Sight · Streets laid out on a grid over a ridge, with th… -
Start at the top of the Collachio, the old Italianate quarter near the centre. Walk downhill first. On a city built on a ridge, choosing to descend before you climb is not laziness — it lets you read the whole slope while you are fresh, so that the climbs later have a shape you already know.
Sound · Limestone reflects sound hard: two people talkin… -
The first stair leads down towards the Grand Harbour. It is about forty steps in two flights, with a landing in the middle. There are 320 monuments and more than 25 churches inside these walls, and on the descent you will pass at least two of them. Use the landings as stopping points and the churches as landmarks rather than destinations.
Touch · The steps are limestone, pale and fine-grained, … -
At the bottom of the stair the streets run level for two blocks — the only genuinely flat ground on the route — before climbing again. Use this flat section to set the breath back to six paces in and six out. Recovering the count on level ground is a skill worth practising, because it is what makes the next climb possible.
Smell · Hot limestone dust in summer, a specific damp-ce… -
The climb back up is the second set of stairs, and it is steeper. Malta's limestone is soft when quarried and hardens on exposure, which is why the treads are worn into shallow dishes. Three paces in, five out, and stop at every landing. The stairs are the point of the route; do not treat them as an obstacle between two flat streets.
Breath · Eighty metres of gain in just over two kilometre… -
The upper section reaches Hastings Garden, a small public garden on the bastion at the north-west corner of the city. From the wall you can see both harbours at once — the Grand Harbour to the south-east and Marsamxett to the north-west — which means you are standing on a peninsula less than 700 m wide with water on both sides.
Sight · Streets laid out on a grid over a ridge, with th… -
Finish by walking the garden's perimeter wall rather than sitting down. The circuit is about 200 m and takes three minutes. Valletta is one of the smallest capitals in Europe at under a square kilometre, and walking the edge of it after an hour inside is a good way to understand how small that actually is.
Sound · Limestone reflects sound hard: two people talkin…
Before you walk
General wellbeing information, not medical advice. Valletta's limestone steps are polished and become slick in the first hour of rain; there are handrails on most flights but not all. Summer heat between 10 am and 4 pm is a genuine risk on the stairs, which have no shade.
Walking guidance on this site is general wellbeing information. It is not medical advice and it does not replace a clinician.