World Heritage Malta - with a day on Gozo

Malta has an extraordinary more than 7,000-year history beginning with the arrival of a little-known people from Sicily who became the creators of Malta's unique Neolithic temples. Older than the Great Pyramids and the famous standing stones at Stonehenge, Malta's megalithic temples were built between 3800 and 2350 BC, a millennium before Mycenae.

All the temples are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, as is the unique Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, the extraordinary triple-layered tomb complex cut from solid rock where the Temple People buried their dead.

And this is just the start of the story. Malta, with its perfect natural harbours, was desired by every trading or invading nation in the Mediterranean from the Phoenicians and Romans to both sides in the Second World War. Each occupier has left its mark, be it Roman-Byzantine catacombs or British red letter boxes.

The greatest impression is perhaps that made by the Knights of St John Hospitaller, commonly referred to as 'The Knights of Malta'. Ousted from Jerusalem and then Rhodes, this order of maritime warrior monks arrived in Malta in 1530 and ruled until 1798. After nearly losing the country to the Ottoman Turks in The Great Siege of 1565, the Knights built a near-impregnable new city on a rocky peninsula between two harbours: Maltas delightful, diminutive capital, Valletta.

Despite the ravages of the Second World War, Valletta remains fundamentally the Knights' city although one area has received a very 21st-century makeover. Badly bombed and poorly restored, the City Gate area has been redesigned by the architect of the Pompidou Centre and the London Shard, Renzo Piano.