Qawra's Roman Catacombs to Enjoy Exclusive Spot Beneath New Block of Flats
A 2,000-year-old burial chamber has secured a rare in-situ position, snugly between the garages and the apartments, with no public access to spoil the exclusivity.
Stop the tour bus. Qawra has Roman catacombs, and you will never see them.
In a visionary leap for Maltese heritage, an ancient Roman quarry and burial chamber discovered near Salina Park is to be lovingly preserved exactly where it is: beneath a brand-new seven-storey block of 48 apartments, 40 garages and a ground-floor shop. The catacombs stay put. Everything else simply happens on top of them.
Preserved in situ, which is to say, sealed in
Lesser nations dig up their antiquities, dust them off, and put them in a museum where anyone can wander in. Malta knows better. Here the remains are kept precisely in place and then thoughtfully sandwiched between the basement parking and the residents’ lobby, protected by a two-metre “non-intervention buffer,” geotextile membranes and a generous slab of concrete. It is conservation in the truest sense: nothing will ever happen to it, because nothing can ever reach it.
It is, in spirit, a vast work of public art in the tradition of Rachel Whiteread’s House, the celebrated concrete cast of a home’s interior. Only here the cast is poured over a Roman tomb, the gallery is a car park, and the opening night is never.
The Romans get neighbours
For two millennia the occupants enjoyed perfect peace and quiet. Now they will enjoy underfloor company, with forty-eight households living, parking and reversing directly overhead, separated only by sound engineering and good manners. The development promises the remains will be supported on “limited pillars in pre-vetted areas,” a phrase designed to reassure absolutely everyone.
Exclusivity, guaranteed
There will be no public access, no interpretation centre, and no museum. The heritage authority keeps the right to pop down for monitoring, which makes the chamber comfortably the most exclusive venue on the islands: capacity nil, guest list shorter still.
“Out of sight, out of mind” is not a criticism here. It is the amenity. So raise a glass in the ground-floor shop to the planners, the engineers and the eternal silence below: Qawra has found a way to honour the dead that asks almost nothing of the living, beyond a mortgage.
