Gozo Rises Up: NGOs Draw Battle Line Against Alex Borg’s High-Rise Invasion

Gozitan NGOs have declared open season on developer Alex Borg and the Planning Authority after Borg’s weekend boast that “high-rise will come to Gozo whether people like it or not.” In a joint statement released on Tuesday morning, 18 civic and environmental groups accused Borg of “treating the sister island like a Monopoly board” and demanded that Prime Minister Robert Abela “reign in the arrogance before Gozo’s soul is mortgaged forever.”

The row erupted when Borg – whose €150 million “Porta Marina” tower in Marsalforn is already under judicial review – told a business brunch that “height is the only way to keep Gozo young.” Within hours, the quip was splashed across WhatsApp chats from Xlendi to Nadur, triggering a wave of memes showing Victoria’s Citadel dwarfed by glass shards. By Monday evening, 4,000 people had signed a petition titled “Borg’s Babel Stops Here,” and the NGO Għawdix had parked a fishing boat outside the Gozo Ministry in Rabat, draped in a banner reading “Gozo is not for sale – it’s for our children.”

Local context matters. Gozo’s 31,000 residents have watched Malta’s skyline metastasise across the channel with the uneasy relief of a sibling who dodged a contagious rash. The island’s 2016 Local Plan capped heights at three storeys outside a narrow “development zone,” precisely to protect the terraced fields and baroque belfries that power 1.3 million annual tourist bed-nights. But a 2022 draft “Gozo Regional Development Strategy” quietly introduced the phrase “strategic high-rise nodes,” and Borg’s 14-storey Porta Marina was fast-tracked as a “pilot project.” When environment NGO Din l-Art Ħelwa challenged the permit, Mr Justice Toni Abela ruled last March that “the public interest in economic regeneration outweighed heritage concerns,” a verdict now on appeal.

Culturally, the backlash is visceral. “My nanna still hangs her washing under the morning sun, not in the shadow of a Dubai wannabe,” said 24-year-old Nadur teacher Marija Camilleri at a spontaneous protest on Monday. Elderly men in the village band club compared Borg’s rhetoric to the 1956 proposal to turn Comino into a US missile base – a plan killed by street demonstrations led by Gozitan women who refused to surrender their goats’ grazing land. “Same spirit, same stakes,” remarked 78-year-old farmer Ċensu Pace, leaning on the same walking stick he carried during the 1989 Gozo civic strike that blocked a landfill at Tal-Qortin.

The economic argument is equally emotive. Gozo’s boutique farmhouses and diving centres market themselves on the promise of “the other Malta, slower, lower, closer to the soil.” Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo’s own 2022 survey found 72 % of visitors cite “unspoilt landscape” as the top pull factor. “If Gozo becomes a mini-Manhattan, we lose our USP overnight,” warned Joseph Muscat (no relation), who runs 20 self-catering cottages in Għasri. “I’d rather hand the keys to my grand-daughter than to a bank refinancing Borg’s next crane.”

Government reaction has been a careful two-step. While Parliamentary Secretary for Planning Chris Agius told Radio Malta that “no blanket up-zoning is envisaged,” he refused to rule out “spot tall buildings where infrastructure allows,” a caveat NGOs interpret as carte blanche. Meanwhile, sources inside Castille say Abela is wary of antagonising Gozo’s decisive 8,000-vote swing before next June’s European election. “He remembers 2019, when a single hunting referendum nearly cost them three seats,” one senior aide admitted.

The NGOs’ statement ends with an ultimatum: withdraw the draft strategy within ten days or face “a Gozo-wide civil disobedience campaign reminiscent of the 1998 Ta’ Ċenċ victory,” when residents blocked bulldozers to save cliff-land from a golf course. Already, priests in Xagħra are preaching against “the sin of concrete idolatry,” and the Sannat feast committee has cancelled a €10,000 fireworks donation from a Borg-linked company. “This isn’t NIMBY-ism,” insists Għawdix coordinator Rita Sammut. “It’s love-of-backyard-ism. And love, like limestone, cracks when you build too high.”

As the sun set behind the Citadel on Tuesday, the island’s only crane stood frozen over Marsalforn bay like a solitary middle finger. Whether it remains alone may decide not just Gozo’s silhouette, but Malta’s identity in the Mediterranean imagination.