People almost always make the same planning mistake with Malta: they choose the month by temperature, as if it were a beach destination in the northern Mediterranean. And the temperature here is benign for most of the year. What actually changes the place is something else.
Water. Malta gets about 581 mm of rain a year spread over barely 61 days, and that distribution is anything but even: the great majority falls between October and March, and between June and August almost nothing falls at all. July records 0.2 mm and zero precipitation days. Zero.
01 Here the year is not measured in degrees
The visible consequence of that calendar is that the island changes colour twice a year. During the wet period, every patch of soil between the dry-stone walls fills with vegetation and the island turns green. During the dry period, that vegetation disappears and the landscape becomes an expanse of pale rock with patches of soil and the occasional thorny bush.
This inverts the instinct of a northern European traveller, who associates summer with green and winter with bareness. In Malta it is the other way round: winter is the growing season and summer is the season when the countryside rests, burnt. Choosing your month without knowing this means blindly choosing half of the landscape you are going to see.
02 Summer is not hot so much as rainless
It is worth being fair to the Maltese summer, because in temperature terms it is not extreme: August averages 27.5 °C, less than plenty of inland cities in southern Europe. What is extreme is the dryness and the light. July racks up 377 hours of sunshine, the highest of the year, and August 352.
On an island of pale stone, that much cloudless, waterless sun produces a very specific effect: glare. There is no shade from vegetation in the countryside, because there is no vegetation; the ground throws light back; and the landscape that was a mosaic of greens in April becomes one bone-coloured tone. It is photogenic in its way, but it is a different place.
Key moments at a glance
16.4 °C, 254 hours of sunshine and 3.8 rainy days, with the countryside still covered.
20.1 °C and only 1.5 rainy days. The grass ends and summer begins.
21.8 °C and 82 mm of rain: the island starts greening again before any cold arrives.
377 hours of sunshine and 0.2 mm of water. Burnt landscape and glaring streets.
03 The overlap: April and May
Which is where this article's answer comes from. If winter gives you the green but also the rain, and summer gives you the dryness but also the burnt landscape, there is a short stretch when the two good things coincide: when the vegetation raised by the winter rains is still standing and the rains have already stopped.
That stretch is April and May. April averages 16.4 °C, 254 hours of sunshine and only 3.8 precipitation days; May rises to 20.1 °C, 310 hours of sunshine and 1.5 rainy days. In other words: practically summer's meteorological certainty, at twenty degrees instead of twenty-seven, with the countryside still covered. In terms of the risk of losing a day to rain, May is as good as June; in terms of landscape, it is a different country.
In Malta you do not choose between cold and hot. You choose between a green island with rain and a stone island without it. April and May are the weeks when you do not have to choose.
04 What summer does to a city made of stone
There is an added reason to prefer spring, and it has to do with how Valletta is built. The city is almost entirely of pale limestone, in narrow straight streets, and half of those streets are staircases climbing up from the harbour. In July, that combination — pale stone throwing light back, streets you have to climb on foot, and vertical cloudless sun — turns any journey into a calculation about shade.
In April and May that disappears. The same stone, with a lower sun and twenty degrees, is simply a golden city that is comfortable to walk, which is exactly what walking it is for.
05 And winter, which is not what you think
An honest note about the cold months, because they are better than they sound. January averages 12.9 °C and 169 hours of sunshine; February 12.6 °C and 178 hours. That is more sunshine in January than plenty of northern European capitals get in May, at light-jacket temperatures.
The price is the water: December is the wettest month of the year with 94 mm over 10 days, and November and January are not far behind. It is not continuous rain — there are still plenty of sunny hours in between — but it is a real chance of losing part of a day. The island, though, will be green.
06 How to use the window
If you have to choose within the window, the second half of April is the most balanced point: there is plenty of green left, the rain is already residual, and it is not hot enough to make the stairs a problem. May is meteorologically safer and warmer, at the cost of countryside that is already starting to yellow.
And make use of the fact that the green is not in Valletta. The city fits into just over half a square kilometre and is all stone; the argument for these two months is outside it, in the cultivated terraces, the south-western cliffs and the dry-stone walls. Give at least one full day to leaving the capital: it is the only time of year when that landscape is switched on.
What you understand by coming in April or May rather than August is that Malta is not an arid island with a long summer. It is an island that lives off one half-year of water and spends the other waiting for it — and those few weeks are the moment when both halves of its year are visible at once.
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