Grand Master's Palace

The Grand Master's Palace stands on St. George's Square in Valletta, the capital the Knights of St. John built after their near-miraculous victory in the Great Siege of 1565. The Order of St. John — a military-religious order originally founded in Jerusalem during the Crusades, subsequently based in Rhodes before the Ottoman conquest drove them to Malta in 1530 — had just survived a four-month Ottoman siege with a defending force of approximately 6,000 against an invading army of 40,000. The victory made the Order famous across Europe and provided the political capital to build Valletta, the first planned Renaissance city in Europe, on the Sciberras peninsula above the Grand Harbour. The palace was begun in 1571 and gradually expanded to fill its entire block; it became the permanent seat of successive Grand Masters and the administrative centre of the Order's Mediterranean operations.

The palace served this function for 227 years, until Napoleon Bonaparte's fleet landed on Malta in 1798 and the Order surrendered without meaningful resistance — a capitulation that remains one of the more ignominious endings in European military-religious history. Napoleon himself stayed in the Grand Master's Palace for a few days before continuing to Egypt; the French occupation lasted two years before British forces, invited by the Maltese themselves, replaced them. The palace became the seat of the British colonial administration, the Maltese Parliament, and eventually the Office of the President of Malta, which it remains today.

The building's two principal attractions are the Palace Armoury and the State Rooms. The Armoury, installed in the former stables, holds approximately 5,000 pieces — full suits of armour for individual knights, Ottoman weapons captured in the various engagements of the 16th and 17th centuries, personal arms of successive Grand Masters, and an extraordinary collection of firearms spanning three centuries of small-arms development. It is one of the most complete collections of its type in Europe, surviving intact because the Knights kept meticulous records and the palace was never sacked or looted in the manner of comparable European institutions.

The State Rooms include the Throne Room, the Tapestry Room, and the Council Chamber — all furnished with period pieces and maintained in use for official functions. The Tapestry Room is hung with the Gobelins series commissioned by Grand Master Perellos in the early 18th century, depicting scenes of the Order's history and representing some of the finest Gobelins tapestries to survive outside France.

The Heritage Malta 3-in-1 combo ticket (t930888) covers Grand Master's Palace alongside the National Museum of Archaeology and MUŻA. The National Museum of Archaeology is the most compelling of the three for visitors interested in Malta's deeper history — it houses the 'Sleeping Lady' and 'Venus of Malta' figurines from the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, among the most important Neolithic artefacts anywhere in the world. The 30-day validity on the combo ticket allows visitors to spread the three sites across multiple days rather than cramming all three into a single visit.