Dar Sant’Anna reopens in Naxxar: 400-year-old orphanage reborn as Malta’s flagship home for disabled adults
Dar Sant’Anna reopens as home for persons with disabilities – and Naxxar’s heart beats louder than ever
By Hot Malta Staff
Naxxar’s skyline changed little overnight, but its soul did. On Monday morning the wrought-iron gates of Dar Sant’Anna – shuttered since 2019 – swung open to a burst of applause, brass-band chords and a shower of pastel confetti made from recycled Easter decorations. The 400-year-old former orphanage is no longer a ghost of limestone and faded frescoes; it is now Malta’s first purpose-built, state-run residence for adults with complex disabilities, a €7.5 million reinvention that locals are already calling “the miracle on the hill”.
Inside, 24 residents – aged 19 to 56 – rolled, walked or were carried across a threshold that once welcomed foundlings abandoned during the 1837 cholera outbreak. Original chapel frescoes have been painstakingly restored, but the nave now doubles as a sensory room where fibre-optic curtains ripple like the Blue Grotto. Where nuns once queued orphans for gruel, a hydrotherapy pool glows turquoise, its ceiling studded with LED constellations copied from the Ġgantija temples. “We didn’t want a hospital vibe,” project architect Maria Camilleri told Hot Malta. “We wanted a Maltese home that happens to have hoists.”
The road here was bumpy. When the last orphan left in 1989, Dar Sant’Anna morphed into a short-lived craft village, then a storage dump for carnival floats. Pigeons nested in the baroque cornices; teenagers broke in to smoke on the roof. In 2019 a leaked photo of a collapsed fresco sparked national outrage. Heritage NGOs demanded action, but it was parents of disabled adults who turned nostalgia into momentum. “Our children were ageing out of state-funded respite centres with nowhere to go,” recalls Naxxar resident Ramona Pace, whose 26-year-old son Kyle has cerebral palsy. “We marched with cardboard cut-outs of the building saying ‘Save one home, create another’.”
The campaign dovetailed with Malta’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and a €50 million EU cohesion package earmarked for social inclusion. Rather than flog the site to developers – a tempting prospect in Naxxar where farmhouses fetch €3 million – government swapped land with the Church, pledged €4 million and crowdfunded the rest through the national lottery. “We proved that social capital can outbid concrete capital,” said Social Policy Minister Michael Falzon at Monday’s reopening, flanked by Archbishop Charles Scicluna who blessed the rooms with incense made from Maltese thyme.
Local impact is already visible. Sixty new jobs – carers, physiotherapists, heritage custodians – have been created, 80% filled by Naxxar residents. The village bakery has rebranded its “ħobż biż-żejt” as “Sant’Anna sliders”, delivering weekly sandwich platters shaped like the building’s oval windows. Even the rival band clubs – Maria Assunta and Naxxar – have declared a ceasefire in their decades-long feud to organise a joint fundraiser concert in the piazza this Saturday. “We finally have something bigger than polkas and politics,” laughs 72-year-old trumpetist Ċensu Galea.
Yet the most profound shift may be cultural. In a country where 19,000 people live with disability but only 3% of public housing is fully accessible, Dar Sant’Anna is being hailed as a living manifesto. Each resident has a personalised door knocker – dolphin, sun, strawberry – designed by local art students. A time-capsule beneath the courtyard contains messages from Lidl cashiers, parish priests and neighbours who pledged to treat the home as an extension of their own. “Integration doesn’t mean wheeling someone to the village feast once a year,” says resident coordinator Jeanette Borg. “It means booking them a hairdresser at 9 a.m. on Saturday because that’s what every Maltese woman wants.”
At dusk on reopening day, Kyle Pace sat on the new roof terrace watching the sun melt behind Mosta dome, his mother beside him. “He kept pointing at the church bells,” Ramona whispers. “He knows they’re ringing for him too.” Somewhere below, a nun’s 18th-century graffiti – “Deus providebit” (God will provide) – peeks through fresh plaster, a reminder that some walls are worth saving because of, not despite, the stories they hold. Dar Sant’Anna has come full circle: once a refuge for Malta’s unwanted children, now a beacon for its most overlooked adults. In Naxxar they say the building breathed again today. Listen closely and you can almost hear it exhale.
