Golden Bay

Our main base of operations was Golden Bay, located on the western coast about 2/3 of the way up the shore on the opposite side of the country from Valletta. Our hotel, the Golden Bay Radisson, turned out to be one of the top spa hotels on the island. Golden Bay is the second largest sandy beach on Malta. Most of Malta’s coastline is jagged rock. The hotel itself is on a bluff overlooking the adjacent beach. Our room was on the 4^th of 10 floors and looked out over the bay. Below is the view from the living room of the apartment as you look out through the sliding glass door/balcony.

As is typical, we had a kitchen, shown below, where we cooked all of our dinners, helping keep costs down. There was also a separate bedroom and huge bathroom with both shower and tub.

The hotel had two outdoor pools, one shown below, which were unfortunately too cold to swim in while we were there. There was also an indoor pool.

Across the bay from us was another bluff with a 400+ year old defensive tower built by the Knights of St. John. A catamaran was moored below it for several days.

The hotel consisted of three towers. Ours was the middle, called the Twilight Tower.

From the terrace where we had happy hour libations several evenings we got a marvelous view of the sunset and later the crescent moon with its two evening stars.

Behind the hotel is the largest park on the island. It was once a British military establishment dating from 1949 which has since been abandoned. The signage said there was a restoration underway, but most of what we saw was derelict beyond repair. Below are shots of the chapel and a large house which might have quartered officers or the base commander. The nearby barrack buildings were definitely smaller than that.

From the park you can get some pretty spectacular views of the coastline.

Malta has a wide variety of vegetation. None of it is large, there seemed to be few trees, but there was quite a bit of low ground cover. Most of the time the plants all look pretty much the same. However, for a few weeks of the year when everything is in bloom you can easily differentiate them. We were lucky; everything was flowering. There were at least 8-10 different plants with yellow flowers alone, at least half that many with white flowers and a scattering of pinks, blues and purples. We were able to identify some of the plants such as the wild fennel, shown below.