Gozo Heritage Day Pass

CitySightseeing Gozo forms part of the world's leading open top bus tour operator present in over 100 locations worldwide! On your arrival at the harbour in Gozo, hop on your City Sightseeing Gozo hop-on hop-off bus. City Sightseeing Gozo operates on 2 routes - route 1 (purple) and route 2 (blue) - and features 15 stops and a multi-lingual audio guide. City Sightseeing Gozo hop-on hop-off buses route 1 (purple) 1. Mġarr Ferry Terminal 2. Xewkija 3. Savina Creativity 4. Victoria (to Dwejra) - the bus stop a few meters down from the Victoria Police Station 5. Ta’ Dbiegi 6. Dwejra 7. Ta’ Pinu - bus waits here for a few minutes for a photo stop 8. Fontana Cottage 9. Xlendi City Sightseeing Gozo hop-on hop-off buses route 2 (blue) 10. Victoria (to Marsalforn) 11. Marsalforn 12. Ġgantija Temples 13. Ramla 14. Nadur 15. Mġarr Ferry Terminal

Explore the cultural history of Gozo from prehistoric times to the early modern period in the heart of the citadel at the Gozo Museum of Archaeology. The museum is located immediately behind the original gateway to the Citadel. The museum’s permanent display is divided into three main sections: Prehistory, the Classical Period, and the Mediaeval and Early Modern periods. The Prehistoric display focuses on many themes, including natural resources, subsistence, daily life, religious beliefs and practices, and burial customs. The Classical Period is represented by a number of Phoenician, Punic, and Roman artefacts, which were discovered on several sites in Gozo and Comino. The artefacts range from those associated with burial to statuary and the decorative arts. The museum visit continues with a display of materials from the Mediaeval and Early Modern Periods, ending with the arrival of the Knights of St John.

From million-year-old fossils to beautiful butterflies and even moonstone fragments, the Gozo Nature Museum is a wonderful journey in the realm of Gozo’s natural resources and their use by the island’s inhabitants. Situated behind the Courts of Justice at the Citadel in Victoria, the museum exhibits geology, minerals, human and animal evolution, and marine life. The geology section has on display marine organisms deposited on the sea floor between 35 and 5 million years ago, as well as fragments of fossil bones from the Maltese Islands. Among the highlights are four tiny moonstone particles gathered from the moon’s surface by the crew of Apollo II and donated to the Maltese people by American President Richard Nixon. The upper floor is reserved to the study of insects, garigue flora and ecosystems of the Maltese Islands including a collection of exotic and local insects, butterflies, moths and the Malta Fungus, formerly believed to grow only on Fungus Rock in Dwejra, Gozo.

Set foot into a time warp hurling you three centuries back, just by walking into the Gran Castello Historic House, nestled inside the impenetrable walls of the Citadel in Victoria, Gozo. The ground floor and mezzanine levels of the southern house feature a reconstructed historic house set-up complete with work and habitation spaces for the serving personnel. A spectacular beast-driven mill occupies the centre of a large mill-room on the same floor. Once the living quarters of the resident wealthy families, the first floor hosts some interesting specimens of period furniture besides other items related to important local but mostly domestic crafts, such as lace-making and weaving. The latter are accompanied by complementary items like the cotton gin and the spinning wheel. The Gran Castello Historic House offers an additional experience to the visitor through an audio-visual presentation about the late Medieval set-up of the same house cluster within its contemporary urban context.

The Cittadella Visitors’ Centre is housed in two old water reservoirs built in the 1870’s in part of the Cittadella Ditch. The Visitors’ Centre is divided into two main areas. The first area offers a number of interactive touch screens and printed panels which deal with various aspects of Cittadella including the evolution of Cittadella, nature, military history, ecclesiastical history and civil history. The other area was converted into a surround theatre where visitors can watch an eight minute video on the salient moments of the millenarian history of Cittadella. All information is available in eight languages.

The Ġgantija temples are a UNESCO World Heritage site. The temples are more than 5500 years old making them the earliest of the Megalithic Temples of Malta and the world's second oldest existing manmade religious structures - older than the pyramids of Egypt! Notwithstanding its age, the monument survives in a considerably good state of preservation. The site consists of two structures, with separate entrances and a common boundary wall. Each unit consists of a number of apses flanking a central corridor. Remains of animal bone discovered in this site suggest communal rituals and feasting. The use of fire is shown by the presence of stone hearths. A number of libation holes in the floor may have been used for the pouring of liquid offerings. It is probable that during ceremonial activities, the congregation would have assembled outside the monument, since the large forecourt in front of the two structures was purposely raised by the same builders.

The Ta’ Kola Windmill is one of the few surviving windmills on the Maltese Islands dating from the Knights’ period. The windmill was one of the main focal points of village life, providing the villagers with flour for the production of bread, the most stable and indispensable food item at the time. Built on two floors, the centrally-placed cylindrical stone tower houses the wooden milling mechanism that still incorporates the original circular grinding stones between which grain was crushed into flour. The various items on display in these rooms all represent a trade, a tradition or a piece of local folklore and will most certainly arouse your curiosity and encourage you to delve deeper into their story and meaning.

The oldest surviving prison in Gozo still reverberates with the memories of its numerous inmates who have incised their mark on the aged walls of its cells and corridors. This site provides an intriguing glimpse into the conditions in which inmates were kept at the time. The prison complex is divided into two sections: an entrance hall which originally served as a common cell in the 19th century and now hosts a selection of graffiti casts, a 16th-century carrack graffito, some prison-related objects (including the surviving part of a wooden stocks); and a merchandise section, and a free-standing block with six individual cells. The graffiti are certainly the highlight of this site. They include mainly sea vessels and date to different periods. However, visitors may also note marks of palm prints, crosses, names, dates, games, and anthropomorphic figures. Some inmates also appear to have scratched a record of their length of stay behind bars.