Gozo’s Ta’ Pinu Gets a Green Halo: 3,000 Trees to Shield Sacred Ridge from Climate Heat

A patch of scrubland opposite Gozo’s most beloved pilgrimage site is being transformed into a fragrant, climate-resilient garden, signalling a quiet revolution in how the sister island protects its sacred landscapes.

The Ta’ Pinu greening project—launched last month by the Ministry for Gozo, the local council of Għarb and nature NGO Żibel—will see 3,000 indigenous trees and shrubs planted on a 4,000 m² plot that until recently served as an unofficial dumping ground for construction waste and old mattresses. When finished in early 2025, the area will become a free-to-enter “living parvis” of carob, lentisk, wild olive and Maltese rock-centaury, complete with shaded seating, interpretation panels and a rainwater harvesting system that will irrigate the plants using runoff from the basilica’s own roof.

For Gozitans, the initiative is about far more than landscaping. Ta’ Pinu Basilica, built between 1920 and 1932 on the spot where local farmer Karmni Grima heard the voice of the Virgin in 1883, attracts 800,000 visitors a year—almost ten times Gozo’s population. The church’s solitary position on a ridge between Għarb and Għasri has always been part of its mystique; pilgrims emerge from the narrow country road to find the limestone façade rising abruptly from open fields, the belfries silhouetted against Comino’s silhouette. Over the past decade, however, tour buses have been idling on dusty shoulders, and souvenir hawkers have set up plastic tables along the rubble walls. The new garden is intended to re-frame that first glimpse, replacing tyre-rutted earth with a planted buffer that still preserves the dramatic approach.

“Ta’ Pinu is not just a church; it is our island’s spiritual lung,” Għarb mayor David Apap told Hot Malta during a site visit. “By breathing green back into the edges, we are giving pilgrims and locals alike a space to exhale before they enter the shrine.” Apap, whose council donated the land, has pledged that every tree will be GPS-tagged so that families can adopt one in memory of loved ones—an echo of the votive plaques that line the basilica’s interior walls.

The species list reads like a roll-call of Maltese childhoods: Ħarruba whose pods were once ground into wartime ersatz chocolate, Sigra tal-Ballut whose acorns fed pigs in centuries past, and the elusive Żnuber, a juniper whose berries flavour Gozitan gin now distilled in Xewkija. All were grown from seed collected within a 15-kilometre radius, ensuring genetic continuity and resilience to the islands’ increasingly brutal summers. A drip-pipe network, fed by a 60,000-litre cistern beneath the visitor centre, will cut mains-water use by 80 %, project engineers say.

Climate data makes the intervention timely. July 2023 was the hottest on record in Gozo, with soil-moisture levels dipping below the 5th percentile for three consecutive weeks. A 2022 University of Malta study predicts that, without canopy cover, the ridge could lose 40 % of its topsoil to wind erosion by 2050. “We are literally planting a shield,” said Dr Rebecca Buttigieg, a spatial planner advising the project. “Every carob can absorb 22 kg of CO₂ annually and intercept 3,700 litres of storm water—ecosystem services the basilica never knew it needed.”

Local reaction has been enthusiastic. Eighty volunteers turned up on the first planting day, among them 73-year-old Ġorġa Cauchi who arrived with a spade her father had used in the 1953 church stoneworks. Schoolchildren from the Gozo College are compiling a “tree diary” in Maltese and English, uploading QR-coded stories that visitors will be able to scan while resting on the limestone benches, carved from off-cuts of the same quarry that supplied the basilica’s ornate altars.

Tourism operators sense an opportunity. Josephine Xuereb, who runs the boutique guesthouse “La Voce” in nearby San Lawrenz, has already fielded 40 bookings from German walking groups specifically asking about the garden route. “Pilgrimage is evolving,” she notes. “Travellers want contemplation and carbon-light footprint in the same package.”

Yet the project’s deeper resonance may lie closer to home. Gozo has watched its agricultural terraces fragment into weekend villa plots; the island lost 7 % of its farmland between 2013 and 2021 alone. Turning church-adjacent wasteland into community woodland is a symbolic act of re-territorialisation—an assurance that not every open view must end in concrete. As dusk settles and the first lentisk saplings cast shadows across the limestone, the basilica’s bells strike the Angelus. Workers down tools; swallows skim the freshly turned soil. In that moment, faith and ecology share the same hush—proof that Gozo’s most sacred spaces can still grow outward, one indigenous root at a time.