St Paul's Catacombs, the great cemetery beneath Rabat

If I could only do one thing in Rabat, it would be this. St Paul’s Catacombs are a maze of passages and tombs cut into the rock under the town, and they show something you won’t see anywhere else in Malta on this scale, how the people of the Roman town and the early Christian centuries buried their dead.

A cemetery used for more than a thousand years

Heritage Malta, which runs the site, explains that these tombs were part of a very large cemetery outside the walls of Melite, the Roman town that covered today’s Mdina and Rabat. The earliest burials go back to the 3rd or 4th century BC or earlier, in the Punic period, and they carried on under the Romans and Byzantines until the 7th or 8th century.

The area, known as Ħal Bajjada or Tad-Dlam, has more than thirty hypogea. The main complex, the St Paul’s cluster, is a network of connected passages and tombs covering over 2,000 square metres. Heritage Malta ranks it as Malta’s oldest and biggest archaeological trace of early Christianity, and it was the first Maltese site awarded the European Heritage Label.

Why are they named after St Paul?

It’s worth getting this right, because nearly everyone gets it wrong. The name comes from the idea that the catacombs were linked to the grotto where, according to tradition, St Paul lived. Heritage Malta calls that a myth. What recent research has shown is that the catacombs and the grotto were part of the same cemetery. So no, St Paul isn’t here, but the name has a certain logic. The grotto is close by and is visited through the Wignacourt Museum; it has its own page, St Paul’s Grotto.

What you’ll see

The entrance leads into two large halls with pillars carved to look like Doric columns, which were once covered in painted plaster, little of which survives. In them are two circular tables cut from the rock on a low platform, recalling the triclinium couches of Roman houses. Heritage Malta thinks they were used for commemorative meals during the annual festival of the dead. For me that’s the most interesting part of the visit, because it makes you think of these galleries as a place the living kept coming back to.

Around the 13th century, when Malta was re-Christianised, an open space in the catacombs was re-cut and used as a shrine, with wall paintings. In 1894 the archaeologist A. A. Caruana cleared and studied the site. Close by, St Augustine’s Catacombs can be seen by appointment, and the rest are rounded up in catacombs in Malta.

How to read the tombs

It helps to know what you’re looking at. The most striking are the baldacchino tombs, blocks of rock carved like a canopied bed and cut free all the way round. Window tombs open into the wall like a niche, and loculi are smaller recesses. The Wignacourt Museum, which has its own stretch of this cemetery, points out that in some window tombs you can still see the hollow carved to rest the dead person’s head.

Heritage Malta adds that at St Augustine’s Catacombs next door there’s a window tomb flanked by two decorated pillars with no equivalent in the St Paul’s cluster. All of this makes far more sense with the audio guide on, which is why I keep recommending it.

Tickets, hours and audio guide

An adult pays €6; youths, over-60s and students pay €4.50, and children aged 6 to 11 pay €3.50. Until the end of October 2026 you can go in any day between 09:00 and 19:00, and on the winter timetable, from November through February 2027, closing time moves to 17:00. Arrive at least thirty minutes before closing; it doesn’t open on 1 January, Good Friday or 24, 25 and 31 December.

The audio guide comes in adults’ and children’s versions, and Heritage Malta reckons on one to two hours. There’s a shop, lockers, baby-changing facilities and somewhere to sit. Access is partial, as some areas can’t be reached by visitors with limited mobility.

Getting the most out of it

I’d buy the €14 Rabat Combo if you’re also seeing the Domvs Romana and Mdina’s Natural History Museum, as it saves €3 and gives you 30 days to use it. I’d arrive at opening, before the heat and the groups, in flat shoes. Then I’d walk over to St Paul’s Grotto to round off the story that starts here, before heading up to Mdina.