Malta’s Blue Lagoon reborn as ‘digital twin’ to fight overtourism and climate threats

# Watch: Blue Lagoon gets a digital twin to safeguard its future

**Comino’s crown jewel is now immortalised in pixels as well as postcards, after University of Malta researchers created the island nation’s first “digital twin” of the Blue Lagoon. The hyper-real 3-D model – stitched together from 40,000 drone photographs and bathymetric scans – will act as a living time-capsule, allowing scientists, planners and the public to track how boat anchors, storms and footfall are scarring one of Europe’s most Instagrammed bays.**

> “We’re not trying to turn the lagoon into a screensaver,” laughed Dr Jeremy Borg, who led the Ocean Mapping Expedition from the Department of Geosciences.
> “We’re giving Malta a baseline: if we know exactly what the seabed, seagrass and sand pockets look like today, no-one can plead ignorance when they’re gone tomorrow.”

The project, unveiled on Tuesday at the Valletta campus, was bank-rolled by the Malta Tourism Authority and the European Maritime & Fisheries Fund after summer visitor numbers bounced back to 4.2 million – 300,000 more than pre-COVID. With up to 5,000 swimmers squeezing into the 150-metre inlet on peak August days, Environment Minister Miriam Dalli warned that “business-as-usual tourism risks loving the lagoon to death.”

Local boatmen, however, greeted the news with a mixture of pride and suspicion. Gozo Channel skipper Ċensu Xerri, 58, whose family has ferried day-trippers since 1972, remembers when “you could see your toes in six storeys of water and count the salema fish circling them.”

> “Now the white sand is churned into clouds by noon,” he shrugged, polishing the brass bell on his luzzu *Maddalena*.
> “If this digital twin helps convince authorities to limit the number of boats, good. But don’t blame us – we’re only answering the demand.”

That demand is etched into Malta’s collective memory. School essays still recount how Knights of Malta used Comino as a hunting ground for wild boar; older generations recall arriving on wooden *dgħajjes* for moon-lit picnics when the island’s single car – a police jeep – was the only engine noise. Today, TikTok clips tagged #BlueLagoon rack up 180 million views, eclipsing even Popeye Village, and have turned the cove into a must-swim checkbox on package tours.

The digital twin captures more than bathymetry. Embedded layers record Posidonia oceanica – the endemic seagrass that anchors sediment and nurtures young grouper – and mark every hawser scar carved by flotillas of day-cruise catamarans. Users can slide a time-bar to simulate sea-level rise under IPCC climate scenarios: by 2050, the iconic arch of nearby Cominotto could be a semi-submerged snorkel trail.

> “It’s like Google Earth, but with a conscience,” explained Masters student Raisa Buhagiar, who spent six months colour-coding boat wakes.
> “You can literally watch the sand migrate away after a busy weekend.”

MTA CEO Carlo Micallef hopes the tool will feed into carrying-capacity limits already being piloted this summer, when 15-minute live counters will beam passenger totals to Transport Malta dashboards. “We’re not anti-tourism, we’re pro-survival,” he insisted, stressing that cruise-liners will be asked to stagger tender departures and that a booking app for independent yachters is in beta.

Reaction in the neighbouring fishing hamlet of Marsalforn was cautiously optimistic. Waiter Steve Zammit, 24, has seen restaurant tips swing from €80 on calm days to zero when jellyfish or diesel slicks drive swimmers away. “If the lagoon dies, we all lose,” he said, stacking chairs after the lunch rush. “Maybe a digital twin is the mirror Malta needs to stop pretending the problem is someone else’s.”

The dataset will be open-access from 1 July, allowing NGOs, dive schools and even secondary students to overlay water-quality readings or litter hot-spots. Plans are afoot to twin the model with real-time sensors that flash alerts when turbidity spikes, giving boat captains a traffic-light system for dropping anchor.

For all its whiz-bang tech, the project’s enduring image may prove more poetic than predictive: a perfect Maltese morning frozen in code, the water that exact shade of electric cyan that made generations of villagers risk rickety boats for a Sunday swim. In digitising paradise, Malta has effectively printed a love-letter to itself – and a warning that even the bluest lagoon can fade if no-one minds the tide.