Ghar Dalam Museum

Ghar Dalam, literally the Cave Of Darkness, is located on Wied Dalam, on the outskirts of Birzebbuga.

During the late 19th and early 20th century, the cave yielded a number of discoveries that were of great significance for the entire Mediterranean region because they shed new light on what was happening here during the Pleistocene, when successive ice ages were gripping Europe. Since the cave acted as a trap for material that was being washed down the Wied Dalam valley, the layers that built up inside it allowed researchers a glimpse of the animals that lived here in different periods.

The cave deposits also provided important evidence on how animal species evolve when trapped on a small island by rising sea levels. One process is dwarfism, whereby large species such as the elephant or hippopotamus adapt to the limited resources of a small island by becoming progressively smaller through natural selection. The inverse process, gigantism, is also possible. For instance, on a small island where predators are absent, conditions may be favourable for small mammals to become larger. These and other interesting evolutionary processes are explained in the new wing of the Ghar Dalam Museum.

Ghar Dalam is important for another reason. It was here that traces of the earliest known human inhabitants of Malta, who had come here from Sicily by around 5,000 BC, were first identified. As a result, the first period of human occupation is called the Ghar Dalam Phase.

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