Well, parts of it are. Only they rarely include the places that are said to be beauty spots – the kind of places that find themselves on postcards, that is. For the most part, these places have been made ugly, wretched, and quite unbearable.
Take the Blue Lagoon. Despite my best efforts at induced amnesia, it has a nasty habit of reminding me that it exists. It made the headlines the other day when two people who were driving a pick-up truck late at night plunged off some rocks and were injured.
My first reaction was to hope they were on the mend.
My second was one of surprise, because I hadn’t realised that trucks were running around on the rocks at the Blue Lagoon, in the middle of the night. The last time I checked, there were no vehicles there at all, at any time of day or night.
But then that was about 20 years ago, when the place was rather a sort of paradise. It would get fairly crowded at weekends in July and August, but that was about it. The rest of the time it was peaceful and pristine. One of the refreshing things was that it was spared the army of cars, kiosks and other contraptions that routinely lay siege to our beaches. The rocks around it were covered with fragrant garigue shrubs. It really was a special place – no wonder it was chosen to play the home of the sea nymph Thetis in the 2004 blockbuster Troy.
I’m sure Thetis would have a heart attack if she saw the place now.
It’s hard to overemphasise what an absolute hole it has become. Every day of every month from March to November, dozens of boats descend on the Blue Lagoon from places as far away as Golden Bay and Sliema, and disgorge legions of day trippers.
Add to that a fleet of yachts, RHIBs, speedboats, and so on, and what you get is water that smells of diesel and has a temperature that’s curiously close to that of human urine.
As if that weren’t enough, a bunch of freewheeling cowboys have taken over the land around the tiny beach and turned it into a million-umbrella case for the hell-is-other-people argument.
We can carry on with the illusion that the Blue Lagoon is one of the seven wonders of the world. It isn’t. It’s a dump
Forget the fragrant garigue, the only smell that offers some respite from the diesel fumes is that of chips frying in well-tanned oil.
Nor is the Blue Lagoon the only degraded place on Comino. Santa Marija Bay on the other side of the island held out for a while but has now been given over to the cowboys. I have photos of the place that show flowering sand dunes among the tamarisk trees. They were taken in 2007. The last time I was there – holding my nose – a forest of beach umbrellas had replaced the flowers.
A second example of a beauty spot where the beauty is about the size of a stamp on a postcard is Dwejra in Gozo. I have in mind especially the area around the Inland Sea, which is a monstrous collection of garages and huts. They seem to have served as an inspiration for the chapel of St Anne, which also looks like a garage and which sits perched on the cliff edge as if to ruffle its ugliness. That, and the requisite mass of kiosks and cars parked right at the water’s edge.
I realise I’m being rather unfair to the biggest island of the three. No matter, because Malta enjoys many more unattractive attractions than Gozo and Comino put together could ever come up with. My personal favourite is Popeye Village, but readers will choose their own.
List of examples aside, there are a couple of general points to be made on this one. The first is that the people whose job it is to keep the list short, appear to be in a deep slumber. Occasionally they wake up to tell us that a mini-Buskett is on the cards, or that the roundabouts are full of flowers, but that’s about it. I believe it’s called tokenism.
There are no easy solutions, truth be told. To prohibit people from going to the Blue Lagoon, or to limit their numbers by making them pay or some such, would be very close to fascist. Which doesn’t mean nothing can be done. It would help, for example, to do away with all the kiosks and other beach rubbish.
It’s been done at Spiaggia dei Conigli in Lampedusa. The result has not harmed tourism in any way. On the contrary, that beach enjoys the highest ratings as one of the most beautiful beaches in the Mediterranean.
The mini-Buskettologists might also be advised to look up ‘restoration ecology’ in the dictionary. Dwejra, for example, would make an excellent candidate for a project of this sort.
Meanwhile, we can carry on with the illusion that the Blue Lagoon is one of the seven wonders of the world. It isn’t. It’s a dump, and to say otherwise is to deceive ourselves and the people who visit us.
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