Qormi, the Casal Fornaro where Malta's bread is baked

If you like Maltese bread, and it’s hard not to, Qormi is the place that explains it. It isn’t a postcard town and it’s on no day-trip route, but it has a crystal-clear identity and an old core you can wander almost alone.

Why the bread is baked here

Visit Malta tells the story with a neat logic. Qormi lies low, near the head of the Grand Harbour, so for centuries it was the first place where goods arriving by sea were stored, wheat among them. Wheat brought windmills, windmills brought a bread industry, and the Knights ended up calling the place Casal Fornaro, the bakers’ village. It’s still the centre of the islands’ baking industry today.

Visit Malta adds that Qormi supplied stevedores to the harbour and that parts of Valletta, Marsa and Ħamrun once depended on it as an administrative and parish centre. I like that as a reminder that the interior never turned its back on the sea. For what to eat with the bread, see Maltese food.

Two parishes and their feasts

Qormi is split into two parishes. St George’s has an imposing church completed in 1684, and its feast falls on the last Sunday of June. Visit Malta highlights a tradition you won’t see everywhere, the Good Friday procession in which participants wear Biblical costumes.

The other is St Sebastian’s, a neo-Romanesque church completed in the 1980s with a distinctive large white dome. Its feast is on the third Sunday of July, and on Easter Sunday the statue of the Risen Christ is carried at a run through the streets. If you’re here at Easter, I wouldn’t miss it; the wider picture is in Easter in Malta.

The old core

Visit Malta describes a town of residential and light industrial areas, with a centre that keeps its alleys and narrow streets. That’s what I’d come to walk, aimlessly, looking at doors and balconies. Some 20,477 people live here, three in four of them Maltese (NSO figures). I haven’t found an official list of bakeries with addresses or hours, so I won’t name one. In a town with this nickname, though, asking a local for the nearest oven is the easiest question you’ll ever put to anyone.

Getting there and where to stay

Bus 62 leaves Valletta terminal for Siġġiewi and runs through Ħamrun, Qormi and Żebbuġ, so you can pair it with Ħamrun, the railway town. There’s also a tallinja Bike station run by Malta Public Transport at Qormi’s Centerparc shopping complex. The MTA register lists no licensed hotels, only three guesthouses and eight holiday lets, so Valletta makes the better base, with Qormi as a morning out. Between Qormi, Ħamrun and Birkirkara lies Santa Venera, a council of 10,006 people crossed by the Wignacourt Aqueduct. Fares are €2 a ride in winter, rising to €2.50 in summer.