A prehistoric Maltese cave museum preserving Pleistocene animal bones and traces of the island's earliest known human settlement
Ghar Dalam
Ghar Dalam is a 144-meter phreatic tube and cave located on the outskirts of Birzebbuga in southeastern Malta. Cut into local limestone, it is best known for the remarkable sequence of Pleistocene and Holocene deposits preserved in its inner chambers, which contain the fossilized bones of animals that once lived on the Maltese archipelago, including dwarf elephants, dwarf hippopotamuses, giant swans, deer, and bears.
The site has given its name to the Ghar Dalam phase, one of the earliest Neolithic cultural stages in Maltese prehistory, and it once held what was thought to be the oldest evidence of human settlement on Malta, dating back roughly 7,400 years. The cave is administered by Heritage Malta as a museum and visitor site, and it is considered one of the country's most important national monuments.
Beyond its paleontological significance, Ghar Dalam combines natural cave geology with an on-site museum that displays both the excavated fossils and reference skeletons. A short accessible section of the cave near the entrance acts as the gateway to the broader museum experience, making the site a compact but unusually rich point of contact between Malta's natural geology, deep-time biology, and early human prehistory.