Neurodivergent Maltese teens transform abandoned Dwejra Lines fort into thriving conservation haven
Neurodivergent youth lead conservation efforts at Dwejra Lines
================================================————-
ĦAĠAR QIM – While most teenagers were still asleep on Saturday morning, a small army of neurodivergent volunteers was already scrambling over the limestone bastions of Dwejra Lines, clutching trowels, seed trays and an encyclopaedic knowledge of Malta’s endemic flora. By the time the first tour buses rolled up to the nearby Ħaġar Qim temples, the group – aged 14 to 25 and all on the autism spectrum or with ADHD – had planted 400 indigenous shrubs, catalogued three new lichen species and built a low-impact path that will steer hikers away from fragile cart-ruts.
“People assume we can’t handle noise or dirt,” laughed 17-year-old Kayden Borg from Żejtun, wiping karst dust from his hands. “But give us a 200-year-old British fort and a conservation brief and we hyper-focus like lasers.” Kayden’s crew are the inaugural cohort of “NeuroDivergent Guardians”, a pilot project hatched by Nature Trust-FEE Malta, the national park agency Heritage Malta and the Richmond Foundation. The idea is simple yet radical: flip the deficit narrative around neurodivergence and treat traits such as pattern recognition, intense curiosity and sensory sensitivity as super-powers for heritage stewardship.
Dwejra Lines, the 4-km stretch of bastions and ditches built in 1875 to defend Victoria Lines, was the perfect testing ground. Abandoned by the military in 1907, the site became a dumping ground for builders’ rubble and a clandestine racetrack for quad bikes. Yet its north-facing escarpment hosts one of the last remaining pockets of Malta’s pre-human garigue, a carpet of thyme, Maltese salt-tree and the endemic Maltese pyramidal orchid. “Traditional conservation crews can struggle here,” explained park ranger Luke Pace. “The terrain is uneven, temperatures hit 40 °C and the work is repetitive. These kids thrived because repetition is soothing and they notice micro-changes in stone texture or plant colour long before we do.”
Local councils have watched the transformation with astonishment. “We’ve been trying to police dumping for 20 years,” said Ħaġar Qim mayor Christine Mifsud. “The Guardians installed motion-sensor cameras and decorated them with hand-painted tiles showing the plants they’d saved. Vandals who saw the artwork actually turned back.” CCTV data shared with Hot Malta shows fly-tipping incidents down 78 % since March.
The project also plugs into Malta’s fraught debate about inclusive employment. Only 24 % of autistic adults nationwide are in full-time work, according to the latest National Statistics Office survey. “Heritage Malta wanted to pioneer a new pipeline,” said CEO Noel Zammit. “If the pilot succeeds, we’ll roll out paid summer internships cataloguing pottery shards at Gozo Museum or digitising 3-D scans of Ħaġar Qim.” For participants, the stakes are personal. “My CV used to say ‘stock boy’ and ‘drop-out’,” admitted 22-year-old Sliema resident Lea Calleja. “Now it says ‘lichen baseline survey coordinator’. My mum cried.”
Cultural resonance runs deeper than ecology. The Victoria Lines have always embodied Maltese resilience – a British blueprint redrawn by locals who added honey-coloured limestone cottages inside the ditches and festa fireworks launched from the parapets. Seeing neurodivergent youth reclaim the fort continues that tradition of adaptation. “We held a night walk last week,” said project mentor Ritienne Xerri. “Instead of tour-guide scripts, the kids explained how moonlight alters the pH reading on limestone. Tourists from Germany said it was the most authentic Maltese story they’d heard.”
Back on the escarpment, Kayden presses a tiny cutting of Maltese everlasting into my palm. “Plant it somewhere windy,” he instructs, eyes fixed on the horizon where the bastions meet the Mediterranean. “If it roots, that means the dust we cleaned is turning back into soil.” In a country racing to build over every vacant lot, these neurodivergent guardians have quietly reminded Malta that preservation begins not with policy papers but with noticing – and that sometimes the best custodians of history are the very people told they don’t fit its mould.
