A newly-refurbished chamber at the Inquisitor’s Palace in Vittoriosa is doubling up as a tourist information office focusing on the Three Cities.

Tourism Minister Karmenu Vella said yesterday the Vittoriosa tourist information office was the eighth to be opened, with the others located in Valletta, Malta International Airport, Valletta Waterfront, Mdina, Mellieħa, Victoria and Mġarr, Gozo.

New offices are planned in Sliema and the Qawra-Buġibba-St Paul’s Bay area.

The offices will eventually operate through a network, as opposed to functioning individually.

Mr Vella noted that since the Vittoriosa office opened two weeks ago, it attracted about 60 tourists a day enquiring about places of interest in the Cottonera area.

The minister toured the upper floor of the palace, which has recently been opened for public viewing after undergoing significant restoration and conservation interventions. It will eventually be offered as a venue for conferences.

Restoration of the 500-year-old architectural gem started in 2007, with the conservation of the façade overlooking Triq il-Palazz tal-Isqof and the sides.

The final stages of the job will focus on the internal courtyard and the back façade.

A few remaining interventions on outside elevations are scheduled to be completed by the end of 2015.

The edifice, which welcomes about 40,000 visitors a year, is one of the very few surviving palaces of its kind. Many of these palaces, which were common all over Europe and South America in the early modern period, succumbed to the ravages of time or were victims of the anti-reactionary power unleashed by the French Revolution.

The Vittoriosa palace was erected in the early 1530s to house the civil law court of the Order of St John. It was then used as the official residence of the Inquisitor General between 1574 and 1798 when Napoleon Bonaparte abolished the Inquisition from the Maltese Islands.

Of the host of inquisitors who served in Malta, 22 were promoted to cardinals and two – Fabio Chigi and Antonio Pignatelli – later became Popes Alexander VII and Innocent XII respectively.

The Inquisitor’s Palace also houses the Maltese Ethnography, a collection portraying the salient aspects of Malta’s urban religious culture, placing particular focus on the early modern period and the impact of the Inquisition on Maltese society through the centuries.