Marsaxlokk Braces for Giants: Freeport Expansion to Welcome Ships Larger Than Four Football Pitches

Freeport terminal expansion will host ships larger than four football pitches – and Marsaxlokk village is watching nervously

By the time the ferry from Ħaż-Żabbar docks at Marsaxlokk, the horizon over Delimara is already a moving wall of steel. The latest container giants – each longer than four football pitches laid end-to-end – glide past the brightly painted luzzus, their painted eyes staring up at hulls that could swallow the entire Sunday fish-market whole. Now Malta Freeport Terminals has confirmed plans to deepen berths, lengthen quays and widen the channel so that these 24,000-TEU leviathans can call every week. For the village whose name is synonymous with colour, calm and kawlata simmering on Sunday stoves, the prospect is part promise and part provocation.

“This isn’t just an engineering story,” says Carmen Briffa, third-generation lampuki fisherman mending nets by the parish square. “When those ships pass, you feel the ground tremble. My grandson thinks it’s exciting; my mother says it sounds like thunder even with the windows shut.” Briffa’s family has fished these waters since before the Knights built the first watchtower on Delimara point. Today their catch competes for space with 400-metre long vessels whose bulbous bows cut through spawning grounds and whose wake can flip a traditional dgħajsa if the skipper mis-times the swell.

The numbers are staggering. The upgrade will add 400 metres of quay and dredge the channel to 17.5 metres, enough to welcome the new “Megamax-24” class that carries the equivalent of 14 million pairs of shoes in one voyage. For Malta, Europe’s southern-most transhipment hub, it means retaining the crown as the Mediterranean’s busiest container port after Valencia and beating Tanger-Med to the punch. For the 3,500 residents of Marsaxlokk, it means more trucks, more dust, more light pollution – and, quietly, more jobs.

“Fifty new positions at the terminal itself, plus 200 indirect,” boasts Freeport CEO Alex Montebello during a press briefing at the Malta Chamber of Commerce. “We’re talking crane operators, logistics planners, customs brokers. These are salaries that stay on the island.” Government, for its part, is sweetening the deal with €40 million in co-financing and fast-track planning permits. Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo speaks of “blue-economy synergies” where mega-ships drop off passengers for day trips to Valletta and Gozo. “Imagine cruisers Instagramming St Peter’s Pool at sunset,” he enthuses.

Yet in the village, the mood is cautious. Marsaxlokk’s identity is stitched from two threads: the neon blues and yellows of the fishing fleet and the lazy Sunday ritual of browsing lace stalls before a rabbit stew at Il-Bukkett. Both feel threatened. “Bigger ships mean bigger wakes,” warns local restaurateur Josef Zahra. “Last winter a surge cracked our quay wall. Who pays when the fish soup ends up in the sea?” Environmental NGOs are louder still. “We risk turning a living harbour into a concrete canyon,” says Annalise Falzon of Friends of the Earth Malta. “Seagrass meadows and tuna spawning routes are already under pressure.”

Still, pragmatism runs deep in fishing families. Briffa’s nephew has enrolled in the Freeport’s new cadet programme; his father jokes that the boy swapped lampuki for gantry cranes. Even the parish priest, Fr Ġwann Sultana, sees providence in progress. During last week’s festa, the band marched past a banner reading “San Pawl tal-Baħar, protettur tagħna lkoll” – St Paul, protector of us all. “Our forefathers prayed through storms and war,” the priest tells me. “Now we pray for wisdom to balance bread on the table with breath in our lungs.”

As dusk falls, the first Megamax of the season edges past Fort San Lucian, lights blazing like a floating city. On the quay, elderly men play briscola under the almond trees while children chase stray cats between stacks of plastic crates. The scene looks timeless, but the rumble beneath our feet says otherwise. Marsaxlokk is bracing for giants, hoping the village soul can still fit between the containers.