St Paul's Island Protected Area and Coastal Landscape Geography in Northern Malta

The history of St Paul's Island stretches back into the religious foundations of the Maltese narrative. According to tradition, the island was long identified as the location of the Apostle Paul's shipwreck on Malta in 60 AD, an event described in the Acts of the Apostles. More recent archaeological work on the seabed near Salina Bay and around the nearby Roman estate of San Pawl Milqi has suggested that the actual wreck site lies elsewhere along the coast, but the traditional association between the island and the Apostle has remained culturally dominant.

Until the late sixteenth century the islands were recorded on maps under the names Isola Salomone and Isola Salomonetto, after the Salomone family who owned nearby land at Selmun. The Maltese forms Selmun and Selmunett emerged from these older labels. In 1576 Marco di Maria escaped Barbary corsairs off the Maltese coast by navigating through the narrow channel between the island and the mainland, leading to his capture of the pirates and a grant of the island from Grand Master Jean de la Cassière. From this point, the island was locally known as Tal-Barba Marku.

After di Maria's death the island passed through his family and eventually returned to the Order of Saint John. Sometime after 1649, Grand Master Giovanni Paolo Lascaris oversaw the construction of a coastal watchtower on the island, designed along the lines of other Lascaris-period towers around Malta. The tower was exchanged as part of a larger land transaction with Michel de Torellas, the Prior of Catalonia. In 1844 a monumental statue of Saint Paul was erected on the island, sculpted by Segismondo Dimech of Valletta and Salvatore Dimech of Lija, and officially blessed in September 1845. The statue has since been restored multiple times by the heritage organisation Din l-Art Ħelwa.

During the early twentieth century the farmer Vincenzo Borg, nicknamed Ta' Bajdafin, lived on the island and converted the historic tower into a modest farmhouse. He abandoned the dwelling and its fields just before the outbreak of World War II, leaving the tower to fall into ruin, with its upper chamber eventually collapsing. Since then the island has remained uninhabited. Pope John Paul II visited the island by boat during his 1990 visit to Malta, and a submerged statue of Christ known as Kristu tal-Baħħara was placed near the island in the same year before later being relocated to Qawra due to declining underwater visibility.

The wildlife of St Paul's Island is limited in scale but includes some locally notable elements tied to the Maltese island ecosystem. A population of the land snail Trochoidea spratti has been recorded on the islands, reflecting the broader presence of small invertebrates that thrive in Mediterranean garigue habitats. In the past, populations of the Maltese wall lizard, in particular the subspecies Podarcis filfolensis kieselbachi, also lived on the island, although this population is reported to have disappeared in the early twenty-first century.

Rabbits were once present on the island but died out due to disease, illustrating the fragility of small island mammal populations. Today, the island's wildlife character is defined more by its vegetation cover and by the surrounding marine life of the northern Maltese nearshore zone than by its terrestrial fauna. The island's small size and isolation mean that even modest species losses are visibly registered, which has given it a kind of natural archive role for understanding how very small Mediterranean islets change over time.

St Paul's Island's conservation profile lies at the intersection of cultural heritage and small-island ecology. Its monuments, including the mid nineteenth-century statue of Saint Paul and the tower ruins from the Lascaris period, have been the focus of repeated restoration campaigns by the heritage organisation Din l-Art Ħelwa, reflecting the recognition that even a small uninhabited island can carry nationally significant cultural assets.

Ecologically, the island's maritime garigue and its specialised flora represent a compressed example of the coastal habitat types that characterise much of northern Malta. The disappearance of the local wall lizard subspecies underlines how vulnerable such small-island populations can be to disease and other pressures. While St Paul's Island is not a large formal nature reserve, its status as uninhabited land and its continued role as a heritage site mean that it functions as a kind of informal protected area, where cultural, religious, and ecological values are maintained together rather than managed apart.

The cultural identity of St Paul's Island is inseparable from the broader Maltese narrative around the Apostle Paul and the Christianisation of the islands. The 1844 statue of Saint Paul on the island is one of the most visible expressions of this connection, and the island is closely tied, at least in tradition, to the canonical story of Paul's arrival on Maltese shores. Nearby features such as St Paul's Bay and the Roman estate at San Pawl Milqi reinforce this cultural geography.

The island also carries a more locally grounded history, including its earlier names Isola Salomone and Selmunett, its association with the Salomone family of Mellieħa, and the vivid episode of Marco di Maria's escape from Barbary corsairs in 1576. These layers of meaning give the island a character that is at once religious, knightly, and deeply local to northern Malta, blending biblical legend with the practical maritime history of an island that has always lived with the sea at its edge.

St Paul's Island stands out for combining unusually strong religious symbolism with the kind of compact Mediterranean island landscape that the Maltese archipelago is known for. The nineteenth-century statue of Saint Paul, the ruins of the Lascaris tower, and the dramatic cliffs and maritime garigue vegetation give the island a layered identity in a very small space. Its accessibility from the Mellieħa coast and its visibility from St Paul's Bay also make it one of the most frequently seen uninhabited islands in Malta.

A further standout feature is the way the island's name itself encodes centuries of change, from the older Salomone and Selmunett labels through the Tal-Barba Marku period following Marco di Maria's escape, before the modern association with Saint Paul became fully dominant. This richness of naming, combined with the island's geological simplicity and ecological distinctness, makes St Paul's Island a useful example of how a small Mediterranean landmass can accumulate unusually deep cultural and natural meaning.

Because St Paul's Island is uninhabited and viewed largely from the coast or from boat excursions rather than entered as a settlement, the timing of a visit is shaped more by conditions on the surrounding water and on the cliff scenery than by any internal park calendar. The calmer and warmer months of late spring, summer, and early autumn generally offer smoother sea conditions for boat-based views of the island and clearer sightlines from the Mellieħa headlands toward the statue and tower.

Cooler and more variable winter weather tends to bring rougher seas around the northern Maltese coast, which can obscure views of the island's cliffs and limit small-boat access. The flowering period of the island's maritime garigue vegetation, especially with golden samphire and Maltese fleabane, is most visible during the warmer months, when the island's compact ecological character becomes easier to appreciate from offshore viewpoints.