Updated 3.35pm

Restoration works have been completed on a stretch of the bastion in Crucifix Hill, Floriana, covering 4,500 m2, Justice and Culture Minister Owen Bonnici said on Monday morning.

The works were completed within a year, transforming the face of the bastion, which is what many cruise passengers see on arrival in Malta.

Dr Bonnici said €600,000 had been invested in the project, which saw stones changed, pointed and consolidated as needed. 

Works will now focus on another area of 1,300 square metres. 

The site where the works were carried out is below the former Sir Paul Boffa Hospital - an area which once boasted a gate into Floriana, known as Kalkara Gate (so named because of a lime kiln situated nearby).

The bastions form part of ones designed by military engineer Pietro Paolo Floriani in 1635.

The gate was dismantled in the late 1880s. Part of the road at Crucifix Hill was built in the early 1920s. It had a sharp right turn down towards the old power station (now part of Valletta Waterfront) but much of the road was straightened after the war when old warehouses were demolished and rebuilt behind the new road, at the bottom of the hill. 

The crucifix which gave the hill its name was originally at the bottom of the hill, next to former seafarer’s lodging house. It is now near the health centre.  

The Floriana bastions were only tested in battle once - ironically they kept out the Maltese in the uprising against the French occupation in 1798.