People underestimate Gozo, and I get why. On a map it looks like a smaller, quieter Malta, and it sort of is, but that misses the point.
| Sponsored post |
The moment you’re off the ferry the pace drops. The fields turn into terraces, the villages are built around churches that are honestly far too big for the handful of people living near them, and the coast goes properly wild in a way Malta’s built-up shoreline never quite does.
It’s tiny, only 42 square miles (67 square kilometres), and you can drive across the whole island in about 20 minutes. That’s exactly what fools people.
They pop over for a couple of hours and think they’ve done it. They haven’t, not even close.
You can have been going for years and still find things you haven’t done. So here’s how to explore the place, because how you get around makes all the difference to what you come home having seen.
Why Gozo takes a bit of effort
Most day-trippers do the same thing. Come over from Malta, take a quick look at the Citadella, maybe relax on a beach, head back on the evening boat, and they leave thinking that was Gozo. It really wasn’t.
So much of the good stuff sits at the end of tracks that no tourist map bothers marking. Sea caves. Clifftop spots where you’ll be the only one standing there. Salt pans a family still works by hand. A natural stone arch down a dirt road most rental cars would rather not attempt.
The island gives back if you’re curious, but only if you can actually reach the places worth being curious about.
And that’s the catch, because getting around is harder than the size of the island makes it look. There are buses, and they’re dirt cheap, but everything routes through Victoria in the middle, so hopping from one bit of coast to another means going back into town and waiting for a connection that may or may not show up when the app swears it will.
You can lose a whole afternoon this way. A car helps. It also comes with narrow lanes, car parks that fill by mid-morning in July, and the small problem that a lot of the best scenery is on rough ground a hire car really doesn’t want to be on.
Which is how most first-timers end up looking at organised tours in Gozo. And for a first visit? Honestly, it’s usually the smart move.
Why tours in Gozo make sense
It’s simple really. A tour takes the two things that catch people out, the navigating and the logistics, and hands them to someone who does it every single day.
Ferry, route, timings, where to stop for lunch, all done for you. You just turn up.
When you don’t know the island yet, that alone earns its keep.
There’s more than one kind of tour, and they’re not all the same. The self-drive ones are the most popular, where you get behind a quad bike or a buggy and follow a guide in convoy along the back roads and coastal tracks.
These are a proper laugh, and they get you to places a coach couldn’t dream of reaching. If steering your own buggy for a whole day sounds like work rather than fun, the tuk-tuk tours are the easy option.
You sit in one of those bright little three-wheelers and the driver does everything while pointing out what you’re looking at. Jeep safaris land somewhere in the middle, off-road but with four proper seats and a roof.
Whatever you go for, the day looks about the same. They pick you up from your place in Malta, then it’s a private boat over to Gozo that skips the ferry queue completely, which believe me in August is worth it.
You spend the day looping round the highlights with a Gozitan lunch somewhere in the middle. Local bread, those little ġbejna cheeselets, whatever’s fresh.
Coming back, many of the tours swing past Comino’s sea caves and pull in at the Blue Lagoon, and in summer you get a swim before the boat carries on to Malta. Try building that same day yourself, with the crossings and the timings and finding lunch, and it’d take real effort and probably still go a bit sideways.
The guides are the part nobody expects to matter and it does. A good one knows the viewpoint that’s worth the extra ten-minute walk, the turning down to a beach with nobody on it, the story behind the tower that makes you actually stop and look.
That’s the difference between a nice day and one you still talk about years later.
What you’ll actually see on a guided tour of Gozo
The stops on a normal tour hand you a proper slice of the island. The Citadella in Victoria is nearly always in there.
It’s a walled old town up on a hill with views right across Gozo from the ramparts. Inside there’s a baroque cathedral with a painted ceiling that pretends to be a dome and fools basically everyone.
There are four little museums if you’re that way inclined and an old prison you can nose around.
Dwejra on the west coast is the dramatic one. The Azure Window, that giant stone arch you’ve seen in a hundred photos, came down in a storm back in 2017, and people here still bring it up with a bit of a sigh.
The bay holds up fine without it though. There’s the Inland Sea, a lagoon joined to the open Med by a tunnel through the cliff, and the old boatmen will run you through it for about 4 euros in cash.
The Xwejni salt pans up north are well worth a visit. These are a grid of shallow pools chipped into flat rock where a local family still rakes the salt by hand through the warmer months. Do it on foot if you can, don’t just drive past.
Ramla Bay is the best beach on the island, wide and backed by dunes, and the sand comes out this odd reddish-gold rather than the usual pale stuff. Climb up to Tal-Mixta Cave on the slope above and you get one of the best views on Gozo, the whole red curve of the bay framed in the mouth of the cave. Just don’t do that climb at midday in August unless you enjoy suffering.
Add the massive church dome at Xewkija, the cliffs at Ta’ Ċenċ, the little fishing village of Xlendi and the arch at Wied il-Mielaħ, and you can see why one unplanned afternoon barely touches it.
How to get to Gozo
However you plan to explore once you get to Gozo, you’ve got to cross first, and there are more ways now than there were a couple of years ago. The old faithful is the Gozo Channel ferry from Ċirkewwa, right up at the top of Malta.
This runs all day and night, takes about 25 minutes, costs around 4.65 euros for foot passengers, with one quirk that gets everyone the first time: you pay nothing on the way over and only cough up on the way back. It’s also the only boat that takes cars, so if you’ve got a hire car, this is you.
Staying near Valletta? The Gozo Highspeed fast ferry goes from the Grand Harbour and does it in around 45 minutes.
And there’s a newer service now running from Sliema and Buġibba straight over, which is honestly a bit of a gift if you’re anywhere along the central or northern coast, because you don’t have to trek all the way up to Ċirkewwa or double back into Valletta first. That one’s about half an hour, the fare sits somewhere between 6.50 and 8.50 euros depending where you board, and like the other fast ferries it’s foot passengers only.
Book a tour though and the crossing’s usually sorted for you anyway, often on a private boat, so it stops being your problem entirely.
Self-guided tours of Gozo
None of this means you can’t do Gozo on your own, and if you’re staying on the island rather than day-tripping, that’s often the nicer way. Give yourself a few days and you can slow right down, wander into villages no itinerary would ever send you to, go back a second time to the spot you liked best.
A car handles most of it, and if you fancy a bit more of a laugh, you can rent a quad outright and follow your own route with a GPS map keeping you roughly honest.
Doing it solo asks more of you, mind. Unfamiliar roads, your own lunch to track down, a bit of guesswork about which unmarked track is worth bumping down and which just dead-ends at a locked gate. But the freedom is the whole point, and there’s a particular kind of joy in rounding a corner onto somewhere quiet with not another soul about. Over a longer stay, that’s tough to top.
What’s the best way to visit Gozo?
The answer to this comes down to how long you’ve got and what you’re after. Over from Malta for one day and want to see as much as you can without losing half of it to logistics? A guided tour is hard to argue with.
You’ll cover way more ground, get to places you’d never find alone, and leave with a real feel for the island instead of one of rushed highlights and a bus timetable.
Got a few days and happy to potter? Then grab a car or a quad and let yourself wander.
Gozo’s small enough to forgive you, and getting a bit lost here is half the fun anyway.
The one thing I’d say, whatever you do, is don’t treat Gozo as a footnote to your Malta trip. A rushed few hours doesn’t do it justice, and it has this habit of turning into the bit people go on about once they’re home.
Give it the time it deserves and the right way to get around, and it’ll pay you back for every hour.
