Sliema is a bustling, fashionable resort. There are a variety of cafés and restaurants and its shops are the best on the island. At night nearby St Julians is perfect for an evening out with a varied selection of bars, restaurants, nightclubs and a casino. Sliema's bathing areas are flat and rocky, and the best beaches are on the north shore. If you desire a day out, the historic capital of Valletta is eight kilometres away to the south. Sliema and St Julian's

North of Valletta, the towns of sliema and St Julian's comprise a new, cosmopolitan centre that that has passed Valletta in terms of nightlife and entertainment.

Sliema is a town of high rises on the eastern shore of Marsamxett Harbour and stretching to the northeast coast to Balluta Bay, where we find its neighbour St Julian's which is ranged around the picturesque, Luzzu dotted Spinola Bay. Both are residential towns and tourist resorts, where you can find the island's highest concentration of cafes and restaurants some of its best accommodation and very good transport connections-making this area of Malta the best base from which one can explore the rest of the island while remaining in touch with nightlife. A district within st Julian's, Paceville is where most of the island clubs are located, every evening attracting in thousands of young revellers. The wide promenade the coastal Tower Road is the Maltese'destination for the evening passiggiata(walk).

During the Knights of St John the sheltered Marsamxett Habour provided shelter for the armadas of the Ottoman. In 1551,Dragut sailed into Marsamxett harbour before giving up to take Malta and heading for Gozo, while the Ottoman fleet also found refuge here in the Great Siege. The Knights gave the harbour's defences in the eighteenth century when they built Fort Manoel on Manoel Island and Fort Tigne at Tigne Point at the tip of Sliema peninsula. The British built four more forts to guard the northern port of the Grand Harbour in the nineteenth century : Fort Cambridge and Sliema Point Battery in Sliema, Fort Spinola in St Julian's

Consisted most of open fields behind the clusters of fishermen hamlets on the sheltered bays along the coast . In the mid nineteenth century,the British had started building summer houses on the coast ,and the Maltese bourgeaisie slowly followed. after the Second World War people from the towns began relalocating here to escape the overcrowded conditions,and the constraction of hotels began in earnest as part of a drive to build a tourist industry; the boom made Sliema Malta's first resort town.

 

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