Ġgantija

Raised before the wheel reached the island, and before metal tools

Ġgantija stands at the edge of the Xagħra plateau on Gozo, the smaller of Malta's two main islands, and its name means "place of giants." Gozitan folklore says a giantess named Sansuna, who ate nothing but fava beans and honey, built it with her child hanging from her shoulder. The real builders were Neolithic farmers, and they built early. Heritage Malta dates the complex to the Late Neolithic, between 3800 and 2000 BC; the southern temple, the larger, older and better preserved of the two, goes back to around 3600 BC. That makes Ġgantija older than the pyramids of Egypt and, after Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, the second-oldest surviving religious structure made by human hands.

There are two temples side by side, each with its own entrance, and the beginnings of a third of which only part of the facade was ever built, all enclosed in one outer megalithic wall facing south-east. Inside, semicircular chambers called apses open off a central corridor; the southern temple has five, and its walls still rise about six metres. The builders knew their stone. They used hard-wearing coralline limestone for the great walls and saved the softer globigerina for doorways, altars and carved slabs, and two fragments of plaster with red ochre suggest the inner walls were plastered and painted. A big block with a hollow at the entrance has been read as a basin for washing before worship. The many figurines found here have been tied to a fertility cult, and Goddess tours today call the pair the Mother and Daughter Temple.

Islanders always knew the ruins were there. In the late 18th century Jean-Pierre Houël drew a plan of them that later proved remarkably accurate, and the artist Charles Frederick de Brocktorff painted the site just before 1827, when Colonel John Otto Bayer, Lieutenant Governor of Gozo, had it cleared of debris. Everything removed was lost without proper study, and the ruins then fell into decay. They went on the Antiquities List in 1925 and the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980; in 1992 the listing grew into the Megalithic Temples of Malta, among the earliest free-standing stone buildings in the world.

Lightweight walkways went in to protect the temple floors in 2011, and a heritage park opened in 2013. Visitors now come in through an interpretation centre showing some of the most important Neolithic finds from Gozo, then follow an outdoor path to the stones, a short walk from Xagħra's village square.