Summer means festa season on the Maltese Islands, when every town and village celebrates its parish saint. Celebrations last all week, culminating with spectacular fireworks late in the evening on the eve of the festa, generally on Saturday. 

Villagers take immense pride in their parish festa,  and would have spent months preparing for this week. They can get quite competitive too, with 'rival' towns or even 'rival' band clubs within the same town, especially when it comes to the volume, quality and quantity of fireworks used to celebrate their saint. 

Brass band marches wind through the beautifully decorated streets, and the titular statue of the parish saint is carried ceremoniously shoulder high on Sunday evening. Make sure you pop in to the churches to marvel at the rich decorations, but remember to cover your shoulders if you're wearing a sleeveless top! 

Our Lady of the Lily, Mqabba

This small town in the south of Malta is famous for one thing: fireworks. Mqabba has not one but two parish feasts, which means that it has two separate band clubs organising the external feasts (the party bit outside the church) and two fireworks factories providing the spectacular displays. And when I say spectacular, I mean it in the most superlative sense. The Lily Fireworks Factory, which provides the pyrotechnic display for this feast, is the proud holder of the Guinness World Record for the largest Catherine wheel ever built, measuring 32.044m (105 ft 1.56 in) in diameter. The record was set on 18th June 2011 in front of a jubilant crowd, which went positively wild when the free-standing Catherine wheel lit up and successfully completed four revolutions under its own propulsion. 

Christ the Saviour in the Eucharist, Rabat

It seems there’s always a festa in the ancient town of Rabat, as it counts no fewer than 10 feasts. However, Corpus Domini, as it is locally known, is its principal one. With around 12,000 residents, Rabat derives its name from the Arabic word for suburb as it is, in fact, a suburb of the old capital Mdina. Half of the present-day village core also formed part of the Roman city of Melite. With history on every street corner and even underground, you could spend days exploring its labyrinthine streets. On festa days, they will be grandly decorated and even more picturesque. The focal point of the feast is the Collegiate Church of St Paul, which sits on top of one of the most sacred places in Malta, the grotto of St Paul, where it is believed the apostle lived after being shipwrecked on the island in 60 AD. The underground cave can be visited from Wignacourt Catacombs or directly through the church. 

St Catherine, Zejtun

Built between 1692 and 1742, the parish church of Zejtun was the fifth of the eight mother churches in Malta, but its dedication to St Catherine of Alexandria is even older, dating back to the 15th century. The church is known locally as il-Kattidral tal-Lvant (the cathedral of the East) and was designed by Lorenzo Gafà, a Baroque architect who was also responsible for St Paul’s Cathedral in Mdina, among others. While the land and the construction costs were covered by a rich benefactor, Girgor Bonnici, a former mayor of Mdina, the Zejtun residents gave their time for free to build the church. This is one church you must visit at festa time, for its opulence and splendour is hard to beat. The week-long festivities are accompanied by brass band marches from the town’s two band clubs and come to an end on the stroke of midnight on Sunday. 

Sacred Heart of Jesus, Fontana (Gozo)

One of the smallest localities on the island is still big on celebrations and they sure know how to paint their little village red. A suburb of the capital Victoria, Fontana counts less than 1,000 inhabitants but includes the evergreen Lunzjata valley, one of the most fertile areas in Gozo. Named after the bountiful stream that runs through it, Fontana still features numerous arched shelters built in the 16th century over each spring, containing traditional stone water tubs which were used by local folk to do their daily laundry. Built between 1892 and 1904 with money set aside by local fishermen for this purpose, the church was established as a parish in 1911. The main altarpiece is by celebrated artist Giuseppe Calì, and was embellished with a golden crown on the first centenary of the laying of the church’s foundation stone - which was exactly 25 years ago - so there’s an extra celebration this year on 18th June, the day after the feast.