Three sandy bays across Malta, including Balluta Bay in St Julian's, will be replenished with sand in the coming days as part of a beach extension programme, Tourism Minister Konrad Mizzi said on Tuesday.

Addressing a press conference near the miniscule St George’s Bay in Birżebbuġa (outside the Al Fresco restaurant), Dr Mizzi said the beach, along with Għar l- Aħmar bay in Marsaxlokk, would be extended by some 25 metres using dredged-up sand from the seabed.

While these two bays would be replenished by the government, Balluta Bay, which had already been used in a pilot project last year, will be extended by the nearby Marriott Hotel (formerly Le Méridien).

Balluta Bay just after the replenishment project in 2018

Dr Mizzi said the hotel owner had pledged to replenish the bay for the next five years. The beach would remain public and no concessions or deck chairs would be placed on any of the three.  

St George’s Bay in Birżebbuġa will be a temporary extension project, with some 1,500 cubic meters of sand to be dredged up.

The other small beach in Marsaxlokk, Dr Mizzi said, would be a "permanent" fixture, with a roughly 15-year lifespan depending on intermittent replenishment.  That project, he said, would include a submerged berm, which will stop the sand from escaping back beneath the waves when the first storms hit at the end of summer.

Balluta Bay had largely disappeared beneath the surface just a few months after the pilot project had been finished, with many questioning the point of having brought up tons of sand for just a few months.

The sands quickly returned beneath the waves after the first storms hit Balluta Bay

Kevin Fsadni from the Malta Tourism Authority has been overseeing the beach extension program, and told Times of Malta that although Balluta Bay had largely returned to the waves during the stormy period, a review of the beach back in February had found that some 15 metres still remained.

The authorities, he said, had identified beaches with natural sand deposits which had slowly vanished after roads built up to the bay, had impacted the normal cycle of sand replenishment.

Pulling up fresh sand from beneath the surface and placing it on dry land, recreated the process of beach formation in the least invasive way, he said.

"Our plan is for the whole coast of the island to be surveyed, and for the beaches such as these to be identified and replenished," he said. 

Dr Mizzi later added that the replenishment projects had been approved by the Environment and Resources Authority and would follow a method statement drawn up by ecological experts.