Letters to the editor – December 17, 2025

Open spaces, open views

Charles Pace of Birkirkara writes:

How pleasant to walk along Wied Riħana and enjoy the fruits of its restoration project, attributed to Project Green. This valley, starting at the roundabout midway to Burmarrad, is now enjoying a project involving both embellishment and control and use of flood waters.

It is a pleasure to see the removal of scruffiness from our countryside, the careful conservation of water, protection of its quality, the building of beautiful rubble walls, the removal of invasive plant species.

It is great to see the robust wooden fence built along the valley, that is neat and protective but does not obstruct the view. One hopes that we have finally learnt the lesson to no longer hide our precious waterways the way the Chadwick Lakes had been hidden by a fence so dense and high one could hardly see through it.

The Maltese language is absent from the billboards informing the public about the restoration project in Għajn Riħana Valley.

Or to no longer hide the sea, as with the Coast Road near Salina, with a wall high enough to make the sea invisible to people travelling in cars, impatient to escape the walls that close us in our towns.

Speaking of walls, one hopes that the building of rubble walls does not go as far as destroying, rather than carefully restoring, what remains of the Roman causeway that runs more or less parallel to the Burmarrad and T’Alla u Ommu Roads, partly along the channels constructed for water catchment.

Local resident Hugh Arnett wrote on Times of Malta years ago about these precious remains. He noted that, in St Paul’s times, ships used to dock close by, as sea water reached areas much closer than now to Burmarrad. Is that the reason why, in the existent old rubble walls, one can find stones so rounded with erosion that they may have been at the bottom of the sea?

Let’s safeguard our treasures. And one of them is the Maltese language, unfortunately absent but for the word ‘fondi’ in the obligatory mention of ‘fondi.eu’, in the billboards informing of the project, as if Maltese were an invasive foreign species.