Backyard Gozo

Gozo is a rural retreat, hence you have to absorb its atmosphere as opposed to just seeing the sights. Its land-area comprises the size of a small, sleepy town, and so it's easy to walk everywhere; stroll through the villages in the north of the island for the island's baroque architecture and Catholic art, in the churches standing head and shoulders above the townhouses and the niches for saints in the street corners. Walk also through the valleys, a heaven for passerines in winter, and savour the sweet taste of the waterlogged bamboo meadows and flowers shooting for spring. And walk around the coast, to find forgotten coves, sandy beaches, boulder-strung coast-stretches, snaking creeks and the seaside cliffs of Ta Cenc where 10,000 pairs of Mediterranean Shearwaters nest - they fly into their crevices at night, meowing like distressed babies.

Gozo also produces excellent local cuisine. Try the traditional pizza (called ftira) cooked in wood-fired ovens. In restaurants, go for fish: you will never go wrong with fish, restaurants cook fish simply to preserve its fresh taste of the sea and its tenderness.

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Gozo is the size of a small and sleepy town - you can stroll across its length in under three hours, so the best way to see Gozo and soak its atmosphere is to use your feet.

A townhouse converted into a guesthouse, family run, friendly and informal - it mainly attracts lone travellers and locals from the mainland. A well-kept secret among budget travelers; the rooms are clean but basic.

A rustic farmhouse converted into a restaurant, it's simple beauty preserved. Eating is either indoors in a room set on warm pastel-colours - pine tables, prints of traditional streetscapes - or on an outdoor terrace among lush bougainvillea. Go for the fish - it's fresh, cooked simply to preserve its fluffy freshness and served with sauté potatoes and vegetables. Service is efficient and the restaurant is spacious, ideal for a romantic dinner for two. Very good value for money.

Gozo's north east coast is a series of bluffs enveloping bamboo-bristled valleys that open up, on the shoreline, on a deserted cove. These coves, some sandy while others rocky plateaus, are beautiful with their bleeding Mediterranean colours: the deep blue of the sea, amber of the sand, faded grey of the clay slopes, warm yellow of the inland cliffs, wilted green of the tamarisk trees.

This is a rural stretch of coast, and you will bump into farmers tending their badmington-court-sized fields stepping up the slope. Farmers are friendly, like to spin yarns about their childhood Gozo, and will invariably burden you with fruits and vegetables.

With a good botany book, you can appreciate the many flowering plants that make Gozo's flora so rich. Watch out for specials such as the Giant Orchid and the Rock Centaury, the endemic national plant.

Above all, this hike skirting the coast is a window on the Meditarrenean's best. It's a world of light and openness, and it feels a world apart: the afternoons bask in a warm stillness, the air fragranced by freshly turned earth and drying grasses and tinged with the salt of the sea.

This is the oldest building in the world, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's a primitive stone temple built in the Neolithic era 5,500 years ago and it is still standing today - proof of the architectural solidity. Its largest stone is large as a pickup and weighs 55 tons. It is a shrine to the fertility cult - the religious path of fertility, death and rebirth of the people and the land that the temple people worshipped and revered. The two twin temples at Ggantija have lobed chambers opening into one another, with altars and motifs engraved on the interior; especially the spiral motif, symbolizing the cyclical nature of the temple people's beliefs. The temples' outline follows the profile of what archeologists call the 'fat ladies' - sculptures of well-endowed women that symbolised the deity of feritility.

The Azure Window is the highlight of an area called Dwejra, that looks like a moonscape: it's an area rich in geological faults and quircks and the result is an inland sea, bowls in the land, islands stranded off the coast, and the Azure Window. The Azure Window is an arch that loops over the water to create a rectangular window at sea level; no wonder it is the most photographed feature in Gozo.