Return Fort Tigné to the people and turn it into historic attraction, NGO urge
Joseph Portelli is poised to take over Fort Tigne from MIDI in a €2.5 million deal and convert it into a hotel
Sliema's Fort Tigné should be returned to the state and turned into a historic attraction rather than a hotel, Fondazzjoni Wirt Artna urged on Wednesday.
The Business Picture reported on Tuesday that Joseph Portelli is poised to take over Fort Tigné from MIDI in a €2.5 million deal that would allow the mogul to convert the historic fort into a hotel.
MIDI said in a statement to the market that it has entered into a promise of sale with Portelli’s firm J Portelli Projects Ltd. The company currently has 75 years left on a lease it signed for the site at the turn of the century.
A spokesperson for Portelli said the plan is to develop the 18th century fortification into a "high-end, low-density hotel".
On Wednesday, FWA said it was seriously alarmed by the announcement.
The historic fort, it said, had been lying empty and in a state of abandonment for over a decade despite the initial effort to restore it as part of MIDI's planning obligations to develop Tigné Point.
"Putting it to a sustainable sympathetic use without impinging on its special historic and architectural merits was part of the original planning obligations of the project and remains a priority.
"Although various historic forts around the world were successfully converted into hotels or short lets, the limited indoor space and particular layout of this fort may militate against it being used in this way without adding to it new buildings," the NGO said in a statement.
"It’s already a disgrace that its left glacis is occupied by a sea view restaurant when the whole fort should have been left unencumbered all round by such cheap development."
FWA said the fort was built by the Hospitaller Order of St John between 1793 and 1795 to guard the entrance into Marsamxett harbour.
Fort Tigné represented the last major defensive work completed by the Order before its expulsion from Malta. Its architecture is representative of a period when star-shaped forts were evolving into pentagonal ones, making it the only one of its kind in Malta.
Besides being a schedule 1 monument, Fort Tigné is also part of Malta's current bid for the Hospitaller Order's fortifications to be included in UNESCO's World Heritage List.
One hopes that, after all the years of hard work by all those involved, this move will not derail the process, FWA added.
"FWA strongly recommends that Fort Tigné be returned to the state to be used as a historic attraction while the whole open area around it is turned into parkland - something which is sorely lacking in what is now a suffocatingly overbuilt Sliema."