Many visitors to Malta will recognise the unmistakable Porte des Bombes as they make their way through the gateway of Floriana and into Valletta. What looks like a standalone triumphal arch, a staple of so many great European cities, was once just a single-arch gateway that connected the walled faussebraye that secured the Floriana Lines, as it traversed from one end of Marsamxett Harbour, to the inner Grand Harbour.

Gone are the defensive walls that once connected this gateway, as urbanisation forced through the advent of wider roads. But a bird’s eye view can help us appreciate the logical, geometric expression of these ordered fortifications that once served the needs of the war machine, and the way these bastions of old were reinforced by ditches, counterguards, glacis, and walls.

Yet today, they are being repurposed into Malta’s most exciting heritage and arts project in decades.

Dr Georgina Portelli, a board member of the Malta International Contemporary Arts Space and chair of its education committee says there is cause for celebration, for well over 6,000 square metres of this historic landscape have now been reclaimed and repurposed as a space for art and culture. “What is happening at MICAS, is essentially a contemporary intervention within Floriana’s historical landscape that reappropriates these outstanding bastions and rightfully democratises the space,” Portelli says of MICAS, the standalone €30 million platform set to be Malta’s calling card to the world of international contemporary art.

“Culture, art, and aesthetics are central to human well-being… Our physical and mental well-being is also dependent on the quality of this engagement with the natural world.”

“Not only have we ensured their continued conservation and safeguarded cultural heritage and areas of high landscape value, but we are doing this by facilitating access to art.”

Portelli has long been an evangelist for MICAS’s role in the community as not simply a ‘museum’, but a project that will intimately become part of the landscape of Floriana and Valletta. She sees MICAS’s geographical location within the complex of the Floriana Lines, as a connection that opens up green spaces while nurturing inclusive social interactions through art.

“MICAS’s vision is intrinsically about developing a holistic and immersive, and multidisciplinary visual art experience, that can widen cultural participation for people through encounters with contemporary art,” Portelli says.

The green space within the San Salvatore Counterguard will be the site of the MICAS Sculpture Garden

This is why, Portelli adds, the concept of MICAS has from the very start been that of instilling a consciousness towards natural environments.

Floriana, the town that hosts MICAS, was a suburb at the entrance of the Valletta promontory that grew out of the fortifications designed by the renowned military engineers Pietro Floriani and later Maurizio Valperga, Carlos de Grunenbergh, and François de Mondion throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Today their bastions, counterguards, and faussebrayes host numerous historic gardens that are part and parcel of these harbourscapes.

“The primary aim here is to provide opportunities for meaningful connections between communities, and their social, physical, and natural environments, while reinforcing relationships and a sense of belonging. These connections will be propagated through art, culture, and free access to open spaces,” Portelli says.

Indeed, public spaces within cities evolve over time – and here we see how the old defensive structures of the Knights’ era that once fended off Ottoman incursions, and later the aerial attacks of the Axis Forces in WWII, is itself transitioning. “Although cities grow, decline, and also revive, public space remains intrinsic to the heartbeat of cities as spaces for place making, meaning-making, and potential realms of memory,” Portelli says, highlighting how physical spaces can be sites of emotion, sentiment or nostalgia for so many of us.

“Cities are human habitats and the pervasive need for public space and its various functions bears out Aristotle’s observation that humans are by nature political animals, social beings with a great need to interact with others – whether as strangers or acquaintances – constructing meaning out of temporary shared social worlds. Therefore, public spaces become vital as places in a city where such a social need can be met.”

Portelli says that from the very start, MICAS’s ethos was to combine the social and aesthetic in this quest for place-making. Today we see the San Salvatore Counterguard, with its expansive terrace, slowly taking shape as the MICAS Sculpture Garden, to be opened in 2026. “It will be a unique space in the city, where people will actively encounter contemporary art, nature, and historic material environment,” Portelli says, hoping that this garden will be another site for the creation of new memories, new connections, and new experiences for the community.

“Culture, art, and aesthetics are central to human well-being. And human beings are part of the wider ecosystem, so a sustained engagement with natural environments is crucial as well. Our physical and mental well-being is also dependent on the quality of this engagement with the natural world.”

“MICAS facilitates a connection to this natural environment, with a new layer to the fortifications: an Agora for contemporary art – dynamic, contemporary, and cultural.”

Together with the Environment and Resource Authority (ERA), MICAS has mapped out the flora present on this soil terrace and its environs, with this knowledge informing the landscaping and context-sensitive planting. This alone will insure against any danger to the fabric of the historic stonework and the established natural environments of the area.

“We will not just be planting rows of ornamental trees, or indulging in artificial landscaping or high maintenance lawn,” Portelli points out. “This is about having a viable and sustainable, native ecosystem.”