The harbour
This is the only trip on this page that does not go to Comino, and it is the cheapest thing here. Ninety minutes from Sliema around the Grand Harbour and Marsamxett, past four hundred years of fortification built to be seen from exactly the angle you are sitting at.
Quick answer
The Valletta and Three Cities harbour cruise is $23 for about ninety minutes. No swimming, no Comino, no lagoon — instead Valletta’s bastions, the creeks of the Three Cities and the Grand Harbour from water level. It carries 2,964 reviews at 4.6 and it is the best value on this page for the time it takes.
Why it is worth ninety minutes
The fortifications were designed to be seen from the water, and only from there.
Valletta was built by the Knights of St John after 1565 as a fortress city on a peninsula between two natural harbours. Everything about its profile — the height of the bastions, the angle of the curtain walls, the position of the watchtowers — was designed to be seen and feared from a ship.
Which means that from a boat in the Grand Harbour you are looking at the city from its intended viewpoint, and it reads completely differently from the way it does when you are walking around inside it.
The Three Cities on the far side are older still: Birgu, Senglea and Cospicua were fortified before Valletta existed, and the creeks between them are where the Knights kept their galleys. A boat is the only way to see all of it as one shape.
What you pass, in order
The route runs out of Marsamxett and round into the Grand Harbour.
Out of Marsamxett Harbour past the eighteenth-century Fort Manoel on its own island.
The full length of the bastions, which is the profile on every postcard and almost nobody sees from the water.
On the tip of the peninsula, where the Great Siege of 1565 began.
Round the point into one of the deepest natural harbours in the Mediterranean.
The watchtower on the point of Senglea, carved with an eye and an ear, is the most photographed detail in Malta after the Blue Lagoon.
Dockyard Creek and Kalkara Creek between the Three Cities, where the galleys were kept.
The one Malta boat tour that is not about swimming
Ninety minutes, all year, and nothing to do with the lagoon.
Every other Malta boat tour on this site is built around a swim stop. This one is built around four hundred years of fortification, and it runs all year while the Comino trips do not.
At $23 for ninety minutes it is also the cheapest Malta boat tour here by a distance, and for anyone with a single free evening it is the obvious answer.
It is worth booking even if you have already done a Comino day: the two trips have nothing in common except the water under the hull.
If you have one evening in Malta and no time for Comino, this is the trip. Ninety minutes, $23, and it runs all year.
The rest of the trip→Book direct
The cheapest Malta boat tour here, and three that go to Comino instead.
★ 4.6 · 2,964 reviews
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★ 4.9 · 316 reviews
This is the only Malta boat tour on the page that runs every month of the year, because it involves no swimming.
The best time to sail→Six things you see on the harbour Malta boat tour that you cannot see on foot
All six are visible only from the water.
No street on this Malta boat tour route shows them whole.
Where the 1565 siege began.
Carved with an eye and an ear, on the point of Senglea.
Where the Knights kept their galleys.
A Malta boat tour is the only way to see all three together.
Passed on the way out of Marsamxett.
Common questions
$23 for about ninety minutes from Sliema. It is the cheapest trip on this page.
No. It stays in the Grand Harbour and Marsamxett, and there are no swim stops.
Birgu, Senglea and Cospicua, on the far side of the Grand Harbour. They were fortified before Valletta was built.
Yes, unlike the Comino swim trips, which mostly stop between November and March.
Yes, a separate evening listing runs the same harbours after dark, when the bastions are floodlit.
For the harbours, yes. The route is compact and there is no transit time in it.
Go deeper
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