Have you ever walked through Mdina wondering what the ancient city was like long ago?

Now you can find out just by whipping out your smartphone or tablet, pointing it at St Paul’s Cathedral and making a 360-degree turn. On your screen you will see the square as it was back in mediaeval times, complete with passers-by dressed in the clothes of the era.

This is possible through a new, free app called Mdina Through Time, which allows users to switch between four eras: the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the time of British rule and the contemporary period.

The 3D reconstruction is supplemented with information about Mdina’s historic buildings and artefacts.

Developed by Icon, the augmented-reality app will turn the visitor’s experience into an interactive one without damaging the site with information placards.

Apart from the 3D reconstruction of the square, visitors can also head to 40 other sites in the city and access virtual information placards on their mobile devices.

Initially made available for Apple, but to be accessible on Android by the end of the year, the app is being launched today, after three years of intensive research under the Heland Project.

Coordinated by a team from the Institute for Tourism, Travel and Culture at the University of Malta, the project was not just implemented in Malta but across nine sites within the Mediterranean region in collaboration with partners from Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Spain and Cyprus.

Funded by the Enpi CBC Mediterranean Sea Basin Programme, its main aim is to enhance the appreciation and management of the social and cultural aspects of tourism sites.

The app will be launched at a conference today, during which the team will explain how they looked at indicators of sustainable tourism.

These are of help in identifying areas that need a management plan and policies that would make tourism in that area more sustainable.

The team from the University of Malta focused on Mdina.

The ancient city is a highly sensitive site that hosts 97 per cent of the total number of tourists who visit Malta, last year numbering 1.7 million.

It is the second most popular tourist site following Valletta and its residential population has been in continuous decline.

The augmented-reality app will turn the visitor’s experience into an interactive one without damaging the site with information placards

“Today there are just 275 residents, as fewer and fewer people want to live there, while more and more tourists visit it,” deputy project manager George Cassar told this newspaper.

“Still, the problem is not the number of visitors but the way this influx of people is managed.”

Project manager Nadia Theuma said a management plan was not meant to limit the number of visitors but rather to spread them out more evenly throughout the day and across the city.

By enhancing their experience in Mdina they could actually stay in the city for more than three hours, the average time each visitor spends there.

The virtual placards developed for the new app are one way of enhancing and lengthening the tourist experience without damaging any of the ancient capital’s artefacts or buildings. The re-search carried out for the project saw the team sifting through numerous documents, knocking on residents’ doors and speaking to members of Mdina’s business community and tourists.

The team, which includes Giusy Cardia and Sarah Azzopardi, will be publishing all the research and findings in the coming weeks.

Did you know?

There was a temple to Apollo in front of Saint Peter’s Monastery of the Benedictine Nuns and an amphitheatre instead of the monastery.

There was a synagogue in the vicinity of Palazzo Falson.

There was no square, but just a road in front of St Paul’s Cathedral before the 1693 earthquake.

The ditch around Mdina was actually started by the Carthaginians before the Romans settled there.