Key takeaways
- About three and a half square kilometres of low limestone between Malta and Gozo, and you can walk across it in under an hour.
- The permanent population is in single figures. There is no village, no shop worth the name and no school.
- There are no public roads and effectively no vehicles. What paths exist are tracks, and everything arrives by boat.
- Santa Marija Tower has stood above the channel since the early seventeenth century, built by the Knights to watch for corsairs.
The scale of the place
Comino is small in a way that is hard to convey until you are on the water beside it. It covers roughly three and a half square kilometres, sits in the channel between Malta and Gozo, and can be walked across in well under an hour on a hot day with a hat.
It is low, dry, pale and mostly bare: limestone garrigue with thin scrub, no trees to speak of, and a coastline that is nearly all cliff. There is no fresh water source of any consequence, which is the fact that explains almost everything else about its history.
Who lives there
Almost nobody. The permanent population has been in single figures for years, and at times has been as few as two or three people. There is no village in any meaningful sense: a chapel, a police station that is not permanently manned, a small number of buildings, and that is close to the whole of it.
In summer the island's population multiplies by a factor of several hundred every morning and empties again every evening, which must be one of the strangest demographic patterns anywhere in Europe. In winter it goes back to a handful of people and a great many rabbits.
The name is thought to come from kemmun, the Maltese word for cumin, which once grew here. An island named after a herb, populated by almost no one, visited by a quarter of a million people a year.
The watchtower above the channel, which has been watching it since the seventeenth century
Santa Marija Tower
The most conspicuous thing on the island is a square watchtower standing on the high ground above the channel. It was built in the early seventeenth century, in the period when the Knights of St John were fortifying the Maltese islands against corsair raids, and it is part of a chain of towers designed so that each could signal the next.
Comino was a genuine problem in that era. An uninhabited island with hidden coves in a busy channel is exactly what raiders want, and the tower existed to make sure somebody was always watching it.
It still dominates the island's skyline, it has appeared in more than one film shot on Malta, and the walk up to it is the main thing to do ashore. The view from beside it, down onto the lagoon on one side and the open channel on the other, is the best explanation of the island's geography anyone could ask for.
No roads, no cars
There are no public roads on Comino and effectively no vehicles. What exists is a network of tracks and footpaths, which makes it one of very few places in Europe where a visitor simply cannot be driven anywhere.
Everything on the island arrived by boat, including the materials for everything built on it. That constraint is part of why so little has been built, and part of why what is there has a slightly provisional quality.
For a visitor it means the island is entirely walkable and entirely on foot. Sturdy shoes and water are the whole of the equipment list, and there is no shade to speak of.
3.5 km²
Three and a half square kilometres, no roads, no cars, and a permanent population you can count on one hand.
What is protected
Comino and the waters around it carry conservation designations, and parts of the island are managed as a bird sanctuary. It matters as a stopping point for migrating birds and as a breeding site for seabirds, which is a real function in a heavily built-up archipelago.
That protection sits awkwardly alongside a quarter of a million summer visitors concentrated onto one small bay, and the tension between the two has been a live subject in Malta for years. Measures to manage the pressure on the lagoon have come and gone.
As a visitor the useful response is simple: take everything away with you, stay on the paths if you walk, and consider that arriving outside the peak hours is better for the island as well as for you.
The island in winter
Out of season Comino reverts. The kiosks close, the boats stop, and an island that carried thousands of people in August holds two or three. It is green after the rains, windy, and completely silent.
Very few visitors see it in that state, which is a pity, because it is the version of the island that explains what it actually is: a dry, empty rock in a busy channel that has been used and left alone by turns for several thousand years.
Seeing it from a boat
Most visitors experience Comino as a bay rather than as an island, because a scheduled boat drops them into one small channel and takes them away from the same place a few hours later.
Going round it by boat is a completely different impression. You see how small it is, how comprehensively undercut its cliffs are, how few buildings there are, and how the tower sits above everything. It takes very little time, and it converts a swimming stop into a place.
