Malta’s Forgotten Roads: How Lost Paths Are Re-Shaping the Islands’ Future

On the road not taken: How Malta’s forgotten routes are shaping our future

The morning mist still clings to the limestone walls of Siġġiewi when 73-year-old Ċikku Camilleri swings open the iron gate that has guarded his family’s fields since 1897. Instead of turning left onto the freshly-laid tarmac that would whisk him to Rabat in twelve minutes flat, he veers right onto a barely visible track swallowed by wild fennel and caper bushes. “This,” he grins, tapping the cracked concrete with his walking stick, “is the road my father took to sell eggs in Valletta. Today, Google Maps says it doesn’t exist.”

Every Maltese family has a version of Ċikku’s phantom road: the mule path that once linked two villages, the coastal track erased by a hotel’s perimeter wall, the shortcut bulldozed into a petrol station. Yet in a country where new flyovers spring up faster than springtime poppies, these abandoned arteries are quietly becoming the islands’ most contested real estate. Environmentalists see them as green corridors that could soak up traffic and carbon. Developers eye them as last slivers of buildable footprint. And residents—especially younger ones—are discovering they hold something money can’t buy: stories.

Take the Victoria Lines trail, the British military service road that zig-zags 12 kilometres across Malta’s width. For decades it lay forgotten behind farmers’ rubble walls, its stone bridges used only by hunters’ dogs and the occasional adventurous goat. Then, in 2021, a group of University of Malta students mapped the entire route on open-source GPS and uploaded it as a “slow travel” hiking loop. Within six months, guest-house bookings in Mosta and Mġarr spiked 18 % on weekends, according to MTA figures. Cafés that once served only pastizzi and Kinnie started stocking vegan energy balls and single-estate coffee. “We doubled our Sunday covers,” says Ramona Pace, who runs a tiny kiosk outside Fort Mosta. “All because people wanted to walk the road nobody drives.”

The economic ripple is real, but the cultural reawakening runs deeper. On Gozo, the medieval footpath connecting Xlendi to the hill-top citadel of Victoria was severed in the 1990s by a private bungalow development. Last year, activists from the NGO Ramblers Association cleared 1.3 kilometres of the route by hand, revealing rock-cut crosses carved by 18th-century pilgrims. “When villagers saw those crosses, they burst into tears,” recalls coordinator Claire Bonello. “One man told me his grandmother used to carry him along this path to the festa. He thought it was gone forever.”

Not everyone cheers the revival. Some farmers fear an influx of hikers will disturb livestock and litter fields with plastic bottles. Others worry that “heritage trails” are merely a Trojan horse for future widening permits. “First it’s a footpath, then it’s a cycling lane, then suddenly you’ve got a three-storey widening project,” warns Siġġiewi deputy mayor Michael Vella. His council recently rejected an EU-funded proposal to asphalt a 600-metre section of mule track, arguing that compacted soil already handles emergency vehicles without inviting heavy traffic.

Yet the pandemic shifted something fundamental. When movement restrictions barred cars from many village cores, families rediscovered walking as recreation rather than necessity. Facebook groups like “Malta’s Lost Ways” ballooned to 18,000 members swapping vintage photos of pre-war bus routes and 1960s seaside promenades. Heritage Malta recorded a 40 % rise in requests to access closed sections of Roman roads buried beneath modern streets. Even government agencies are listening: Infrastructure Malta’s latest five-year plan earmarks €3 million for “green mobility corridors” that reuse historic cart-ruts rather than carve fresh ones.

Back in Siġġiewi, Ċikku Camilleri reaches the end of his invisible road and pauses where the track meets a brand-new bypass. Engine noise ricochets off the limestone like a shout across a canyon. He bends down, brushes aside a clump of thyme, and exposes a chiselled stone marked with a single letter: “C” for Carmelo, his grandfather. “We can build all the roads we want,” he says, straightening up. “But if we erase the ones that taught us who we are, we’ll only end up going faster nowhere.” The bypass lights flick on, automatic and indifferent, while behind him the unmapped path waits—quiet, patient, ready for whoever chooses to walk it next.