I have to admit, before this trip I had never heard of the Island of Gozo. I could see it from the cliffs near the resort where we stayed in Malta, but from that vantage point it was hard to tell there was a channel that separated the cliff I was standing on from the striking limestone cliffs across the beautiful stretch of blue water to the northwest. Once we were in Malta, the general consensus of the people I consulted was that Gozo was definitely worth the trip across the channel and that the effort would be rewarded. I am glad we took the time. It was easy and affordable to ferry the rental car across the channel and we could see the smaller islands of Comino and Cominotto from the ferry as we passed by them. If the weather had been warmer, the Blue Lagoon that separates the two would have been worth the time too. But, it likely would have been crowded and we try to avoid crowds as much as possible. It was windy as we passed by and there were very few people from what we could see on that day from the observation deck of the ferry. We didn’t actually climb the historic Saint Mary’s Tower of Comino, or swim the lagoon; but we did see them, albeit from a distance.
The pace on Gozo is much more relaxed and if I had it to do over again I would have planned the trip so that we stayed a night or two. It would have been nice to have had the time to interact with the people a little more. The people call themselves Gozitans. It is clear from the few residents we spoke with, they are proud of that and consider themselves different. I found it interesting that on such a small place, you still have the feeling of rivalry.
One of the things I did on Gozo (while my wife sat in the sun and read her book) was visit Ġgantija, now included within the UNESCO World Heritage site: The Megalithic Temples of Malta. It is believed to be a temple from the Neolithic era which is older than the Egyptian pyramids. According to archaeologists, it is more than 5000 years old; making Ġgantija the world’s second oldest existing man-made religious structures after GöbekliTepe (located in present-day Turkey). To me, it was worth the time to visit the little museum on site and walk the grounds where people thought about paying respect to forces beyond themselves. As you can see from some of the photos available by clicking here, the stones are huge. It makes you wonder how they were able to cut and place the stones (though local legend has it that the stones were placed by a giantess nursing a baby). You can also see from the photo above, that the landscapes are impressive, even though we were too late to see the Azure Window, a Gozitan tourist attraction that collapsed into the sea in 2017. It is worth looking it up on Wikipedia, so for your convenience, I have linked it and you can compare it to some of my photos from the Dwejra Bay area from December 2022.