Victoria’s Heartbreak: Gozo’s Capital Mourns as Centuries-Old Buildings Crumble in Weekend Deluge

It started with a low rumble that echoed through the narrow alleys of Victoria just after dawn on Saturday, a sound locals describe as “the city sighing.” By the time the church bells of the Basilica of St George rang for the 7 a.m. mass, two heritage town-houses on Triq Fortunato Mizzi had folded into themselves like wet paper, their 300-year-old limestone blocks sliding into a single heap of ochre dust. A third façade—belonging to the former home of Gozo’s first print-maker—bowed outward, its green wooden balcony snapping off and crashing onto the granite cobbles below. No one was hurt, but by sundown the island’s capital felt bruised, its residents wandering the cordoned-off streets in plastic sandals and dazed silence, clutching umbrellas that did little to keep out the sideways rain.

Gozo’s civil protection chief, Josephine Xuereb, told Hot Malta that 68 mm of rain fell in ninety minutes—more than the island usually sees in all of May. “The storm sat right over Victoria,” she said, pointing to a red blob on the meteorological map that looked uncannily like a bleeding heart. Drains designed in the 19th century for a population of 3,000 were overwhelmed by today’s traffic, cruise-day trippers and apartment blocks whose flat roofs channel water straight onto the street. Add two years of pandemic backlog on maintenance, and the result is what Mayor Samuel Azzopardi calls “a cultural cardiac arrest.”

For Maltese who grew up taking the 25-minute ferry from Ċirkewwa for Sunday lunch in the Citadel’s shadow, Victoria isn’t just Gozo’s administrative hub; it is the island’s living room. The collapsed buildings housed a 90-year-old lace shop—where many Maltese brides bought their għonnella—and a tiny cinema that showed subtitled Italian classics every Thursday. “My father proposed to my mother in that foyer,” said 62-year-old Valletta resident Mariella Camilleri, who drove up as soon as she saw the news on TVM. “We are a nation that keeps its memories in stone. When stone falls, memory shakes.”

By noon, the Gozo Channel ferry had turned into a floating blood-drive clinic, with commuters donating water, blankets and pastizzi. Inside the cordon, restoration architect Prof. Alexia Pace from the University of Malta picked through rubble, photographing baroque cornices now pulverised. “Limestone is like a sponge,” she explained. “It drinks rain, then quietly dissolves from the inside.” Pace’s team will 3-D-scan surviving walls so that master masons—Gozo still has six—can carve replacement blocks from the same quarry in Ta’ Ċenċ. Yet the waiting list for skilled stone-cutters is already six months long; EU funds earmarked for rural roads may have to be diverted, angering farmers who say their fields are still flooded.

Tourism operators fear a second blow. May bookings for boutique hotels inside Victoria’s medieval core had just returned to 2019 levels; now TripAdvisor fills with photos of snapped balconies. “People don’t come to Gozo for beaches alone,” said hotelier Rebecca Vella. “They come for the illusion that time stopped. When walls collapse, so does the illusion.” Economy Minister Silvio Schembi has promised emergency grants of up to €50,000 per damaged façade, but locals want assurance that redevelopment won’t mean glass-and-steel replacements. A spontaneous Facebook group, “Victoria’s Broken Heart,” gained 18,000 followers overnight, demanding a master-plan that caps new heights at three storeys and obliges owners to use traditional kantuniera cornerstones.

Sunday evening brought a break in the clouds and a rainbow that arched from the Citadel to the floodlit football ground. Children placed tealights where the balcony had fallen, forming a flickering outline of the lost wrought-iron. Someone set up a loudspeaker and played Freddie Portelli’s “Viva l-Maltin”; old men wiped their eyes. By midnight the candles had melted into coloured puddles, mixing with the last of the rain. Victoria will rebuild—Gozo always does—but the city woke up today smaller, its skyline chipped, its stones lighter, as though part of its soul had been rinsed away with the stormwater gushing down to Mgarr.