Malta’s Blue Lagoon rescue plan: visitor caps, booking slots and public fightback revealed

Blue Lagoon rehabilitation plan consultation to be launched in coming weeks

Comino’s postcard-perfect but overcrowded Blue Lagoon is finally getting a long-overdue lifeline. Environment Minister Miriam Dalli confirmed this week that a public consultation on a “comprehensive rehabilitation plan” will open within the next three weeks, kicking off what could be the most radical rethink of Malta’s most Instagrammed swim-spot since boat operators first dropped anchor there in the 1960s.

Sources close to the project told Hot Malta the plan is expected to propose a daily visitor cap, a floating pontoon system to replace the chaotic cluster of day-tripper boats, and a ticketing regime that would require tourists to pre-book half-day slots. A “wild zone” on the lagoon’s less-accessible western shore could be roped off completely, allowing Posidonia seagrass damaged by decades of dragging anchors to regenerate. Ferries from Ċirkewwa and Marfa may be rerouted to a new jetty on Comino’s southern cliffs, freeing the main inlet from the diesel haze that locals say hangs like a curtain every July morning.

For Gozitan fishermen who have watched the turquoise inlet mutate from a hidden pearl into a summertime carnival, the consultation cannot come soon enough. “We used to bring our kids here to learn how to snorkel,” says 68-year-old Joseph “Il-Bibi” Xuereb, who has fished Comino’s waters since 1973. “Now you drop a line and pull up a Red Bull can.” Xuereb’s voice cracks when he recalls the smell of grilled rabbit drifting across the rocks during the feast of St Mary last August—tourists barbecuing on disposable trays balanced over fragile karst. “It’s not hatred of visitors,” he insists. “It’s hatred of what we allowed it to become.”

The numbers are brutal: up to 4,000 sun-bathers cram the 120-metre stretch of coarse sand on peak days, according to NGO EcoVisio, generating an estimated 1.2 tonnes of solid waste every 24 hours. Tour operators ferry roughly 700,000 passengers to the lagoon annually—more than Malta’s entire population. The result? Nitrogen levels 30 % above Mediterranean norms, a 40 % decline in native salema fish over the past decade, and emergency medical calls every other weekend as heat-struck tourists are winched out by helicopter.

Yet the lagoon is more than a spreadsheet of carrying-capacity metrics. In Maltese folklore, Comino is the island of the Holy Spirit, where 17th-century corsairs hid their plunder and 20th-century British soldiers trained for D-Day landings. Elderly Mellieħa residents still speak of “il-ħarġa tal-kavallieri,” the annual August pilgrimage when farmers crossed the channel on rowboats to celebrate Mass in the tiny Santa Marija chapel. That chapel, wedged between the lagoon’s limestone cliffs, now competes for oxygen with a thumping sound system on the deck of a triple-decathecum catamaran named “Party Monster.”

The consultation will therefore test not just environmental thresholds but national identity itself. “We are deciding whether Malta sells its soul for the last €20 ticket or whether we reclaim a commons,” says architect and urban planner Prof. Antoine Zammit, who sits on the government’s newly formed Comino Steering Committee. Zammit’s draft sketches, leaked to Hot Malta, show a car-free foreshore, solar-powered shuttle boats and a visitor centre carved into an abandoned British barrack, telling the story of the archipelago’s salt-harvesting era. Revenue from entrance fees—rumoured to be set at €15 per adult—would fund wardens, seabed clean-ups and a seasonal ferry discount for Maltese ID card holders.

Business owners in Buġibba and Xlendi are already jittery. “If you tell a German backpacker he has to book a slot two weeks ahead, he’ll just hop to Cyprus,” warns Kurt Cauchi, CEO of Supreme Cruises, whose yellow speedboats are a familiar blur across the channel. Cauchi proposes instead dynamic pricing: higher fees at midday, cheaper sunrise swims. “We need smart management, not a padlock,” he insists.

The coming consultation will run for eight weeks, ending just before the feast of St Peter & St Paul, when Maltese families traditionally claim the island for picnics of fenkata and ħobż biż-żejt. NGOs are mobilising volunteers to translate technical documents into Maltese sign language and Arabic, ensuring the capital’s taxi drivers and hotel cleaners—many of whom escape to Comino on their single day off—can shape the future of the water they regard as “il-baħar tagħna lkoll.”

Whatever the outcome, one thing is clear: the Blue Lagoon we knew—equal parts paradise and punchline—will never be the same. The question is whether Malta chooses controlled change or lets nature, and angry residents, impose it instead.