The hospitality industry has been active in Malta since quite early. Records, to be exact, appear mostly episodic, like when the Inquisition, in 1588,  took an interest in a Vittoriosa lodging house because meat bones had been hurled onto the public road on a day when religious discipline prohibited the consumption of meat. 

That alerted the watchdogs of public morality to a scandalous breach in the practise of the faith.

The Beverly Hotel, close to St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, established itself as a favourite lodging for visitors in the Victorian era.

Ġużè Cassar Pullicino, in 1981, undertook the first serious study of the evolution of hotels, inns and lodgings for temporary hire in Malta but limitedly to the British period. In 2005, I attempted to push that research further back, to the 16th century. The outcome of these studies has been ongoing and sometimes surprising, like the discovery of a conside­rable presence of women running the early hospitality business scene in Malta.

The Cecil Hotel in Old Bakery Street, Valletta, faced Flores College, corner with Archbishop Street.

The St Ursula Street entrance to the old British Hotel in the war years. It later grew and turned into the present Grand Harbour Hotel.

The entrance of the Hotel D’Angleterre in St Lucia Street, in the 1910s.

The present pictorial feature only covers early Valletta hotels that are no more. Hotels outside Valletta will form the subject of a future spread. Accommodation for visitors concentrated mostly in the Valletta and Sliema-St Julian’s areas but a few could also be found in other localities, including Gozo. Given the scarcity of photographic records, I have, exceptionally, supplemented my gallery with non-photographic images.

Lodging houses on the Grand Harbour waterfront in the 1920s, mostly frequented by seamen.

Hotel scenarios in Malta have changed unrecognisably, from the pre-independence trickle of foreign visitors to today’s mass tourism glut. Pre-war tourists who left written memoirs of their Malta experiences describe some Maltese hotels in rather unflattering terms: many of their owners were only interested in fleecing the guests. They cheated on everything, from the food to the services, from the laundry to the charges.

The Westminster Hotel in Strada Reale was a pre-war lodging that survived up to the 1960s. Note the first Progress Press next to it.

The Australia Hotel, in Strait Street, Valletta, in the post-war years.

One 1914 British visitor who otherwise loved Malta, identified in hotel owners the greatest problem that subverted his vision of Malta as a tourist haven. 

All photos from the author’s collections.

A 1910s advertising card of the Hotel De Paris, in St John Street, Valletta, where the first National Museum was later situated.