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Xagħra is one of Gozo's major towns, and is the site of one of the best-preserved temples on the Maltese islands. The temple here is known as Ġgantija (pronounced roughly like "gigantica"), after the imagined race of giants who built it. The builders were in fact a copper age civilisation, about whom not much is known apart from their predilection for building stone temples with curious round rooms. Modern-day Xagħra has standard Maltese architecture, but it's a pretty attractive, affluent-seeming town.

Compare and contrast...

Irrespective of the purpose of the temples, the act of building them ranks the early Maltese and Gozitans as one of the most advanced civilisations of the prehistoric world. This temple is older than the pyramids, and much older than poor old Stonehenge. (The local museums carefully call the islands' temples the "oldest known free-standing stone buildings" in the world.)

The temple was excavated in 1827, and it clearly wasn't too long before the tourists started arriving.

Also worth seeing in Xagħra is Xerri's grotto, a small network of natural limestone caves. The original Xerri discovered the grotto under his house in the early years of the 20th century while digging for water, then spent the next decade or so clearing it out and putting in stairs and lights. All that hard work was certainly worthwhile as far as his descendants are concerned—we were shown round by his granddaughter, or possibly great-granddaughter. The story had a happy ending for Xerri, she told us: he dug another well in another spot, and this time he found water.

 
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