Court legalises Fortina’s illegal Sliema lido: Malta’s coast loses again

Court confirms sanctioning of illegalities at Fortina’s Sliema lido
By Hot Malta staff

The Court of Appeal has upheld a planning tribunal’s decision to sanction years of illegal development at the Fortina Lido on Sliema’s once-pristine foreshore, closing a chapter that many residents hoped would end with demolition rather than forgiveness.

In a 42-page judgment handed down on Tuesday, Mr Justice Lawrence Mintoff dismissed every plea by Fortina Investments Ltd, confirming that the 2006–2012 extensions to the commercial lido – including a 420 m² concrete deck, a timber-faced platform and a bar cut into the rocky shoreline – were built without permits. Instead of ordering removal, the Planning Authority will now issue a regularisation permit against a €50,000 “contribution” and a string of mitigating conditions.

For Sliema, the verdict is more than a dry legal footnote; it is the latest brick in a wall of impunity that has turned the town’s coastline into a necklace of privatised concrete. Locals who have watched cranes hover over the water for two decades greeted the news with a resigned shrug. “We’ve lost count of the times we were promised our coast back,” said 68-year-old Alfred Grech, who has swum off the Għar id-Dud rocks since boyhood. “Now they’ve legalised the theft.”

The Fortina site sits bang in the middle of the Tigné promenade, the capital’s weekend catwalk. Tourists photograph the sunset; teenagers leap off the bastions; pensioners argue over plastic tables at the kiosk. The lido itself – umbrellas in Pantone shades, €15 day-beds and a DJ who drops Calvin Harris at noon – has become shorthand for the island’s sun-and-spritz culture. Yet the same stretch of coast is officially a public domain, protected by both the 2016 Public Domain Act and a 1990 shore-protection policy that bans new structures below the high-water mark.

How, then, did Fortina get away with it? The company argued that the works were “minor” upgrades to a 1970s concession and that swimmers’ safety required wider sunbathing decks. After the PA’s enforcement notice stalled for years, the owners filed for sanctioning in 2014, triggering the legal saga that ended this week. Environmental NGOs described the manoeuvre as “classic strategy”: build first, pay later, keep the profit.

The court accepted that the development harmed the coastline but deferred to the PA’s “discretion” to regularise. In Malta’s planning lexicon, “discretion” has become a euphemism for political expediency. “This judgment rubber-states the idea that enforcement is negotiable,” said Astrid Vella of Flimkien għal Ambjent Aħjar. “It tells every operator: go ahead, pour the concrete, the worst you’ll get is a fine.”

Businesses, however, insist that lidos are vital to the tourism economy. “We employ 120 people, 80 % Maltese,” Fortina CEO Philip Fenech told Times of Malta in 2021. “Without adequate facilities, tourists will simply fly to Cyprus.” The company has already pledged to landscape the roof and install solar panels, gestures meant to sweeten the pill.

Yet the cultural cost is harder to quantify. Sliema’s rocky shoreline used to be an open-air living room where families spread picnics on limestone slabs and children learnt to snorkel among the posidonia. Piece by piece, that commons has been carved into rentable squares. “We are losing the very informality that defined Maltese summers,” said architect and urban planner Professor Conrad Thake. “When every cove becomes a branded experience, the coast ceases to be a civic space.”

Tuesday’s ruling also exposes the toothlessness of Malta’s public-domain watchdog. The Lands Authority, which owns the seabed, must now sign off on the lease extension – a procedural box-ticking exercise, insiders admit. Meanwhile, the €50,000 “contribution” will go into the PA’s planning gains fund, a pot critics call a “concrete slush fund” because it finances new development rather than environmental restoration.

For residents, the only remaining recourse is political. Local council elections loom in June, and the newly formed coalition “Sliema Coast Watch” is fielding candidates on a single-issue ticket: reclaim the shore. “We can’t reverse this decision,” said candidate Rebecca Cachia, “but we can stop the next one.”

Until then, the Fortina Lido will keep its illegal deck, now blessed by the courts. And as another cruise ship glides into the glistening creek, passengers photographing the sunset will hardly notice the concrete beneath the candy-striped umbrellas – a silent monument to Malta’s favourite summer sport: building first, asking questions later.