Comino covers barely 3.5 square kilometres and counts fewer than a dozen permanent year-round residents, yet its northern inlet draws more day visitors than almost any single point in the Maltese archipelago.
The Blue Lagoon Malta boat trip from Sliema tours have carried travellers across this channel for generations, following a sea route that traders, fishermen and the Knights of St John once used to shuttle between the larger islands of Malta and Gozo.
The lagoon itself is a shallow strait between Comino and the uninhabited islet of Cominotto. Sunlight passes through only a few metres of water before striking a pale bed of crushed limestone and sand, and the reflected light gives the shallows their unusually saturated blue. Around the corner lies the Crystal Lagoon, a deeper cove ringed by cliffs and pierced by sea caves that boats can enter when the swell is low. Above the water, St Mary's Tower — Torre di Santa Marija, raised by the Order in 1618 — still guards the approach, a squat stone sentinel visible from every deck.
Comino has worn many roles. Its name traces to the cumin that once grew wild across the karst plateau. The Order used the island as a hunting reserve and a place of exile; later it held a quarantine hospital and, briefly during the Second World War, a defensive outpost. Santa Marija Bay, on the sheltered eastern side, keeps the island's only chapel and a small tamarisk grove planted to hold the thin soil.
Today the appeal is elemental rather than architectural. A Comino Blue Lagoon cruise trades the density of Valletta and Mdina for open horizon, limestone stacks and water clear enough to read a coin on the seabed. Powerboats and catamarans alike thread the same passage, some pausing at the sea caves of the Gozo coast before returning south. The wider Gozo and Comino boat tour circuit stitches these fragments together — Blue Lagoon, Crystal Lagoon, Santa Marija Bay and the caves — into a single day on the water. For all its modern popularity, the setting has changed little. The tower, the twin islets and the shifting bands of turquoise remain much as earlier crossings would have found them, which is why Blue Lagoon Malta boat trip from Sliema tickets continue to sell steadily through the summer.
5 hr
