Dragonara Point
The rocky nose of the St Julian's headland, under the casino and the Westin, listed at 15 m average and 25 m maximum and dived by almost nobody. Everything around it is documented; the point itself is a blank.
ReefDivers rarely, if ever, come here.
We found no record of anyone diving this site. It is charted so the picture of what lies under the water is complete, not because it is a place to go: there is no set route, no local briefing to lean on, and nothing on this page has been proven in the water.
Sea conditions
Stay dry right now
Sea is up (2.9 m NW) · Long swell (1.4 m every 10 s) · Gusts to 63 km/h
Done for today. Tomorrow: not looking good. Best it gets is 44 at 17:00: Sea is up (1.2 m NW)
Forecast for the site, updated 19:45 · Models disagree
Measured at Fort St Elmo (5.3 km away, 19:45): 36 km/h from WNW, gusts 39. The next hours lean on it.
- Waves
- 2.9 m
- from NW, biggest 3.9
- Wind
- 39 km/h
- WNW, gusts 63
- Swell
- 1.4 m
- 10 s period
- Sea temp
- 22 °C
- air 18 °C
Hour by hour
Next 7 days
0 2.9 m48 W
0 2.8 m46 WNW
54 0.8 m16 WNW
77 0.4 m13 ESE
68 0.5 m11 E
61 0.6 m18 NNW
72 0.5 m15 SW
Sunrise 06:25, sunset 17:05
Waves: Copernicus Med-Waves 4 km + MFWAM 8 km + EWAM 5 km + ECMWF WAM 9 km. Wind: ICON-2I 2 km + ECMWF IFS 9 km + ICON-EU 7 km + UKMO 10 km + ARPEGE 11 km. Read a few km out on the side the site is open to, then blended.
Exposed to wind and swell from: N (0°), NE (45°), E (90°). The point faces east and north east into open water, so a Grigal from the north east or a Lvant from the east puts you straight on the nose, and a northerly has a long clean fetch to build on. The prevailing north westerly blows off the land here, which is exactly why this coast is where Maltese divers go when the Majjistral shuts the north and west down. The south and south east sectors are largely screened by the Sliema and Valletta peninsulas a couple of kilometres down the coast. Visibility on this stretch is usually moderate to good rather than spectacular, and the surface is the problem far more often than the water. Best season: Late spring and October, when the sea is still warm, the boat and jet ski traffic has thinned, and the light north westerlies leave this side of the headland flat. Midsummer is the worst time here, not for the conditions but for everything buzzing about on top of you..
The dive
Dragonara Point is where the St Julian's peninsula runs out into the sea, with the old Scicluna palace and its casino sitting on the tip and the Westin spread behind it. St George's Bay opens to the north west, the Portomaso and Hilton frontage runs away to the south, and the headland itself pushes east into open water. On the charts of Maltese dive sites it appears with an average of 15 m, a maximum of 25 m, an advanced grading and a shore access rated hard, and then the paper trail stops. No dive centre sells it, no report walks you through a route, and the single rating it carries online is a shrug.
What is certain is the ground either side of it. Three hundred metres south, Merkanti Reef lies in two rock ridges running parallel to the shore with a canyon between them, topping out near the surface and dropping past 20 m, thick with small ledges and holes and carpeted in Neptune grass. That is the house reef of the dive centre inside the Westin grounds, so the rock under the point is the same limestone, worked by the same swell, and there is no reason to expect it to be bare. Expect a shallow shelf of boulders and cut ledges off the nose, thinning into grass and then sand as the slope runs out toward 25 m.
The reason the point goes unvisited is everything above the waterline. The shore is hotel, casino and lido frontage with no public steps and nowhere sensible to kit up, and the water off it carries pleasure craft, hotel water sports, jet skis and passing ferry traffic all summer. Dive it as a boat drop, or swim up from the Merkanti bay and accept the distance. Either way it is a surface marker dive from the moment you leave the rocks, and it is best kept for a flat, quiet, out of season morning.
- The nose of the St Julian's headland, with the casino and the Westin directly over your head
- A short hop from Merkanti Reef, its twin ridges and the canyon between them
- Ledges, boulders and grass from about 8 m down to 25 m on the same limestone as the reef next door
- One of the last unwritten dives on Malta's busiest piece of coast
Typical plan
Treat this as exploration, not a briefing. The numbers below describe the section running out from the rocks of the point itself, so from the Merkanti bay add a 500 m transit north before any of it applies. The tidy version is a boat drop just off the nose, down the boulders to about 12 m, then out along the ledge line on a fixed bearing until the rock gives way to grass and sand somewhere between 19 and 23 m. Turn on time rather than on a landmark, because there are none you can trust, and come back up the same bearing to finish shallow over the rubble. Forty five minutes on a single twelve, nitrox 32 if you want the margin, a compass you actually look at, and a delayed surface marker up from the moment you leave the shallows, because the traffic overhead here never really stops.
What the bottom looks like
- 1Fallen limestone blocks under the headland8 m deep · 20 m out · under the boat
- 2Step where the shallow shelf gives out12 m deep · 40 m out · 20 m from the boat
- 3Ledge and overhang line running off the nose16 m deep · 90 m out · 70 m from the boat
- 4Neptune grass between the rock fingers19 m deep · 150 m out · 130 m from the boat
- 5Open sand at the foot of the slope23 m deep · 230 m out · 210 m from the boat
Cut limestone ledges and boulder rubble off the headland, breaking up into Neptune grass patches and then clean sand as the slope flattens toward 25 m.
Who you might meet
Almost always
Sometimes
Marked ones can hurt you. What they do and what to do about it is under Getting in and staying safe.
Getting in and staying safe
Only for serious professionals who know exactly what they are doing. With no record of anyone diving here there is no one to ask and no set route, so treat every line below as the start of your own planning, not a briefing. Plan it as an expedition, not a dive.
Hard, and that is most of the story. The headland is wrapped in hotel, casino and lido frontage, there is no public entry point on the point itself, and parking anywhere in St Julian's or Paceville is a fight in high season. The realistic options are a boat out of Sliema or St Julian's, which is the sensible choice, or the recognised shore entry for Merkanti Reef in the small bay next to the Merkanti Beach Club between the Westin Dragonara and the Hilton, which puts you roughly 500 m south of the point with a long swim or a careful underwater navigation to follow. The dive centre inside the Westin grounds uses that bay as its house reef entry and is the obvious place to ask before you try anything here. Cafes, toilets, showers and taxis are everywhere, since you are standing in the middle of a resort strip.
- Constant surface traffic in summer: pleasure boats, hotel water sports, jet skis and ferries rounding the headland. A deployed surface marker is not optional
- No established entry or exit on the point itself, and the shoreline is private hotel and casino frontage
- Long surface swim, roughly 500 m each way, if you come from the Merkanti bay
- Almost nothing published about the site, so no landmarks to navigate by and no reference profile to lean on
- Snagged fishing line and discarded gear on the shallow rock
- A headland bends swell around it, so the shallows turn surgy well before the forecast looks bad
- Visibility and water quality drop after busy summer weekends
Marine life to respect
Mediterranean moray · Morina Can hurt you
Bites hard if a hand goes into its hole. Keep hands out of cracks and never feed one.
Red scorpionfish · Ċippullazza Can hurt you
Venomous spines, and it sits still on the rock. Look before you kneel or hold on; hot water if stung.
A bit of history
The name comes from a cave rather than the palace. Għar Ħarq Ħamiem, the anchialine cave beside St George's Bay a few hundred metres west of the point, is known locally as the Dragonara, and the old story that dragons lived in it is also why the bay next door carries the name of the dragon slaying saint. The cave itself is a genuine oddity, fresh water lying over brackish and then sea water, a lower chamber reachable only by diving to around 50 m, and an amphipod found nowhere else on the island.
On the headland, Ta' Għemmuna Battery stood here before the banker Emmanuele Scicluna built his summer palace in 1870. It served as an officers' hospital in the First World War, sheltered more than a hundred refugees in the Second, and reopened in July 1964 as Malta's first casino. Just around the corner to the south there is one more footnote: on 29 July 1955 the passenger ferry Star of Malta struck Merkanti Reef and went over, and two people, one crew and one passenger, were lost.
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Further reading: Malta Dive Sites, Dragonara Point index entry · Malta Dive Sites, Merkanti Reef, the neighbouring site and its shore entry · Wikipedia, Merkanti Reef and the Star of Malta grounding · Wikipedia, Dragonara Palace, position and history of the headland · Wikipedia, Għar Ħarq Ħamiem, the Dragonara cave · Divers Guide, Merkanti Reef, seabed, visibility and marine life