Active treats for teens on a magical history tour

Ben Ross takes his family in search of adventure, archaeology and some Game of Thrones locations on a long weekend in Malta and Gozo

In Malta, you can’t even crash a Segway without being given a history lesson. We’d travelled to Golden Bay – the most developed of a trio of sandy beaches on the north-west coast – in search of a family adventure on two wheels, and after a quick briefing in a car park from an enthusiastic chap called Jean Karl, had all bumbled off down a rough track. I had been quietly impressed – one of those smug “how great is my family?” moments – by how quickly our two sons, aged 14 and 12, got to grips with all the off-road gyroscopic chicanery, when the inevitable happened and the younger one hit a pothole at speed. He was soon lying on the ground bleeding copiously from his elbow, while the still enthusiastic Jean Karl set about him with bandages and antiseptic wipes.

Clive, our guide, immediately saw his opportunity and took me by my own elbow (whichch was mercifully unscathed) to pointoint out a group of limestone buildingsildings rising golden in the sun.n. “Old barracks, from when the British governed rned Malta,” he told me, before re spinning me round. “And that is the Ghajn Tuffiehaeha Tower,” he said, gesturing to the southern tip of the bay. “Built in the e 17th century by the Knights of St t John, to signal a pirate attack.” My children are at an age where a balance needs to be struck. Activity holidays where the boys get daily exercise – a bit like puppies – always work well, but from their parents’ point of view there’s that growing pre-GCSE anxiety that they should be exercising their minds at the same time. Happily, a long weekend in Malta delivers plenty of opportunity for both these things to happen, frequently within seconds of each other. For a start, there’s that constant peeling back of the historical onion skin. Golden Bay was once known as Military Bay; it’s now dominated by a hotel complex and plenty of parasols, alongside those quietly disintegrating barracks buildings. Much longer ago, the Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Romans all left their mark in Malta. Indeed, throughout the centuries, armies have arrived, traders traded and pirates pillaged aplenty here. As Clive pointed out, y you can expect little else on “a strategi strategically positioned piece of rock wi with one of the deepest and bes best harbours in the Mediterranean” Mediterranean”. To all that you might add a welcoming clima climate (Clive: “300 days of sunshine a y year!”) that lures rain-shy E European retirees, and won wonderful medieval and ren renaissance archit architecture – not to ment mention helpful tax brea breaks – that has led to ama more recent invasion,in this time of fifi film crews. Plenty of scenes from Game of Thrones were shot here, with the ornate former capital of Mdina doubling for King’s Landing and the crumbling cliffs at Migra l-Ferha, our next stop, serving as an occasional backdrop for the exploits of Khal Drogo, the Dothraki horse lord.

As he was only bleeding a little by now, we took the opportunity to hoist our youngest over the edge of those cliffs for his first-ever attempt at abseiling. Marek, an invader from Prague, helped us do it, once he’d located the right equipment (“Sorry, I forgot your helmets and harnesses,” should go down as one of the great opening lines in abseiling history). By the time we’d all got to the bottom, the boys were so proud of their achievements that – had it been age-appropriate – they would probably have attempted to conquer George R R Martin’s fictional land of Westeros by themselves. Ben’s eldest son tries abseiling, above; Ghajn Tuffieha Tower at sunset, right; Ghajn Tuffieha beach, below;

horse lord Khal Drogo, bottom left; St George’s Basilica in Victoria, Gozo, top left

Malta’s sister island, Gozo, lies a 25-minute ferry crossing away, to the north-west. Its celebrated limestone arch, the Azure Window (also a Game of Thrones location) collapsed into the Med earlier this year and is now attracting scuba divers rather than sightseers, but we didn’t let that put us off. On our visit we combined a session of sea-kayaking – making our way from the harbour at Hondoq ir-Rummien towards the smaller isle of Comino (population: three) and its blue lagoon – with an excursion to the Ggantija megalithic temple complex (“Older than Stonehenge!” reported Clive gleefully). Here, huge blisters of ancient stone had been assembled into cloverleaf patterns long before the arrival of the wheel, provoking awe even in seen-it-all-on-PS4 teens.

Gozo is lusher than Malta, rendered fertile by its blue-clay soil. The capital, Victoria, named as a sop to the British queen on her Golden Jubilee in 1887 but more commonly known as Rabat, is hugely impressive, the stone slabs of the 17th-century Citadel rising above the town, twisting streets leading to a massive baroque cathedral at its heart.

I know what you’re thinking: massive baroque cathedrals aren’t usually the sort of thing that grab teenagers’ attention. However, the Maltese archipelago delivers its history in an absorbingly theatrical fashion. Perhaps that’s why the Game of Thrones producers were lured here: these citadels, cathedrals and palaces British Airways (0844 493 0787; ba.com) offers return flights to Malta from London Gatwick from £132. Ben Ross and family stayed at the Intercontinental in St Julian’s (intercontinental. com/hotels/gb/ en/malta), which has two pools and a private beach. Doubles start at £80 per night. For a full review and to book, visit telegraph.co.uk/ tt-interco-malta. For more information about the Maltese archipelago, visit maltauk.com. still resound to echoes of the past, a blink of the eye from being real, inhabited places, where exoticsounding people such as the Grandmaster of the Knights of St John went about their lives.

There’s a delight in the detail, too: in the story of the aerial bomb that pierced the dome of the Roman Catholic church in Mosta in 1942, falling during mass but failing to explode, an event interpreted as a miracle by the locals (unsurprisingly, given the huge size of the replica on display); or the sombre facts elicited at the Catacombs of St Paul in Rabat on Malta (the amphora burials for children; the mourners hired to lament during the funeral); or the ornate balconies – wooden, stone, enclosed, open – that you see everywhere. Even the door handles are impressive, as much status symbols as ways of getting entry to a building (“The bigger the family, the bigger the knockers!” said Clive, clearly getting into his stride).

Then there’s Malta’s capital, Valletta, where light from the prism of history splits to cast fresh colour on the present. The extraordinary City Gate project by architect Renzo Piano, completed after much delay in 2015, is a vital link: a clean, modern entrance to the peninsula that nevertheless has echoes of the past, reflected in the pattern of “missing” stonework in the parliament building (designed to represent the crumbling limestone bricks found all over Malta) and in the open-air theatre that rises from the ruins of the former opera house (bombed during the Second World War).

The boys, inevitably, were rather more interested in the more literal echoes caused by the saluting battery, a tradition begun in 1820 so that naval vessels could recalibrate their chronometers at noon each day. That evening, a fireworks festival added some bonus gunpowder while lighting up the panorama in flashes of white, gold and red.

Almost everything in Valletta is appealing, from the sheer drama of its position, a spike between two harbours, to the view of the so-called Three Cities – Birgu, Senglea and Cospicua – across the bay, where the Knights repelled the Turkish invaders in the great siege of Malta of 1565. Our only misstep was to visit the “Malta 5D” show, a rather tired project that attempts to summon up Malta through the ages via some ropy CGI, shaking cinema seats and a few puffs of scented air. Game of Thrones it was not.

Malta doesn’t need computergenerated enhancement or vibrating furniture to show off. A visit here is a chance for your children to set out on a few adventures of their own while watching real-life history unfurl before them – and there will be plenty of drama for the grown-ups to enjoy long after the Lannisters and Starks have done battle for the last time.