Happy birthday! The Wignacourt Tower is celebrating 410 years since its construction
It is now the oldest standing tower on the islands.
Happy birthday, kid! The Wignacourt Tower in St Paul’s Bay, also dubbed as Saint Paul’s Bay Tower, is celebrating 410 years since it was built.
This tower was the first of six of the watchtower series by Wignacourt to be built, and was completed in 1610. It actually replaced the role of a former tower known as Dejma Tower. Later in 1715 an artillery battery was added to ward off intruders.
Through history, it is documented to be the second tower to be built on the islands, the first one being Garzes Tower in Gozo. After this was demolished in 1848, Wignacourt tower became the oldest surviving watchtower on the Maltese Islands, still standing today, practically intact.
This watchtower, together with all the others situated at various important points around Malta and Gozo, provided fortification to the islands. But before the 16th century, this wasn’t the case as the coastline was virtually unattended while the harbour was the defended area.
Grand Master Martin Garzez changed this, starting the trend of building a watchtower. His successor, the ever important Alof de Wignacourt went on to build a series of towers, funded personally by him. The first stone of the Wignacourt Tower was blessed (a standard ceremony back in the day) and laid on 10th February 1610.
Wignacourt Tower was the only major fortification defending the north of Malta at the time, until Saint Agatha’s Tower (more commonly known as the Red Tower) was built in 1649 up in Mellieha, and later on others which could be seen from St Paul's Bay. The battery that was added in 1715 housed two 18-pounder guns that were used in defence.
In subsequent years, the British used the tower as a police station, a postal agency and the department for post and telephone in Malta. In the 1950s, the staircase to the main entrance on the first floor was removed once road widening works began. An entrance was added at ground level.
Nowadays, the tower is a museum and shows of models of different fortifications found on the Maltese Islands, replicas of items found in the tower itself during the 17th and 18th centuries, vintage phots and a beautifully restored cannon. Din l-Art Helwa restored the tower in the ‘70s and it was later restored and cleaned in 2015.