Malta entry requirements, by passport

What draws travelers to Malta

Malta is the smallest country in the European Union and one of the densest in history per square kilometre: Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, the Order of St John, Napoleon and the British Empire left overlapping layers on an archipelago you can drive across in an hour. Valletta, the capital built by the Knights Hospitaller after the Great Siege of 1565, has been a World Heritage site since 1980 and is one of the most concentrated historic cities anywhere: St John's Co-Cathedral holds Caravaggio's "Beheading of Saint John the Baptist", the only painting he signed. The other two sites on the list, also from 1980, are prehistoric and explain why the archipelago matters more than its size suggests: the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, an underground sanctuary carved out of the rock more than 5,000 years ago, with access limited to a handful of visitors a day, and the Megalithic Temples — Ġgantija on Gozo, Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra, Tarxien — among the oldest free-standing stone structures on the planet, older than Stonehenge and the pyramids. Those are the country's three World Heritage sites. Around them, Mdina, the walled silent city; Gozo, more rural and slower; and Comino with the Blue Lagoon. The official languages are Maltese, Semitic in root and written in the Latin alphabet, and English, a British legacy that explains the number of language schools on the island.

Sources for this section: whc.unesco.org (World Heritage List: 3 sites in Malta — City of Valletta 1980, Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum 1980, Megalithic Temples of Malta 1980 with a 1992 extension). Accessed 17 September 2026.