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Stones & Grasses in Gozo
Does Gozo have what it takes to become a rural tourist destination? The feature below analyses Gozo’s strides and struggles in its bid to develop rural tourism
In Martin Portelli’s new restaurant, a small intimate place set in the living room of the 200-year-old farmhouse where he lives, cream and bacon and butter have been banished. “In the old times,” he explained, “they didn’t have those ingredients.” And Portelli is singularly focused on offering the grub of the old times: the hearty and traditional dishes of Gozo, Malta’s tiny sister island situated in the centre of the Mediterranean. Dishes include the likes of calamari stuffed with rice, prawns, capers, and herbs such as marjoram; pie with rabbit meat, peas, carrots, and potatoes; or zucchini sautéed in garlic, tomatoes, parsley, and half-dried sheep’s cheese. “I used to have some of those dishes at my grandma’s,” Portelli added. “The difference is that my grandma used to heap everything on a plate, but here the presentation and delivery is professional. Diners say that eating here is like being in my living room, and that’s the way I want them to feel.”
The restaurant, called Il-Wileg, has proven to be a winner – and the most sophisticated manifestation yet in Gozo’s new embrace of rural tourism. Other restaurants have also gone native to varying degrees, more mindful in creating a taste of Gozo. And such emphasis on green and traditional experiences is also the motive of a raft of new ventures that offer varied activities such as working at a real farm, fishing with a traditional fisherman, or indulging in outdoor adventures like rock climbing, hiking, and kayaking. These developments – coupled with a renaissance for the traditional lifestyle (making one’s olive oil is becoming something of a fad) – is seeing Gozo quietly rediscover its rural ethos and outdoor attractions.
The time is ripe for such transformation. Gozo relies on tourism – it’s the only high-value industry in the insular island of 30,000 inhabitants that’s small enough to be walked across in a day along its longest span – but classical sun-and-sea Mediterranean tourism started floundering in the mid-nineties. By the turn of the century, occupancy in hotels had dropped to an annual average of about thirty percent, and three major hotels went under in recent years. Other hotels are struggling as an insufficient volume of tourists is compounded by changing accommodation patterns away from hotels and seaside resorts to accommodation in converted farmhouses and townhouses in the hinterland.
“Most tourists that today visit Gozo don’t want to sit in a bar in a five-star hotel and sip a drink,” told me Victor Galea, who set up the Ager Foundation in 2005. “They want to get out there and learn something, and they want activities or adventures. Luckily, Gozo still has the farming and rural infrastructure, so it shouldn’t take a long stretch to develop rural tourism.”
Ager’s customers can opt to spend a day working at a real sheep farm, or pick up fruits and graft trees at a fruit orchard, or tend crops in the fields, or even go out fishing with a real fisherman in his vernacular boat. Another opportunity is to spend a day with a host family and learning to cook traditional dishes, in some cases even taking the dishes to be baked at the village bakery. “Our guests love the opportunity to meet real-life people,” Galea said. “Getting close to the locals and traditional culture is a highlight of their trip.”
Other outfits are doing similar things. Ta Mena Estate, Gozo’s first agro-tourism enterprise, is flourishing with a mixture of vines, olive trees, orchards, and plots of mixed vegetables spread over 25 hectares. Farm animals will follow, and soon the farm will be ready to start receiving visitors who want to spend a day or more pottering at a farm. And Gozo Adventures has developed various adventure activities – including long-distance swimming and hundreds of rock climbing and deep water soloing routes (climbing freestyle on coastal cliffs and falling harmlessly into the sea) – and published a guidebook about rock climbing, scuba diving, coasteering, hiking, and mountain biking. “My revenue has doubled since I started in 2003, and new opportunities are arising all the time,” said Xavier Hancock, the Welshman who developed Gozo Adventures. “We’re now focused on consolidating our business, and my ambition is that in five years time I’ll be running an adventure centre where we will be doing courses in adventure sports.”
The effort of these companies, as well as other freelance operators, has injected impetus in Gozo’s faltering tourism. But is it enough to create a momentum that will lift the island out of its current slump? After all, Gozo isn’t inventing rural tourism. Gozo has to compete with established destinations such as Tuscany and Umbria in Italy, and the hundreds of other places in the Mediterranean that are also developing rural tourism. Does Gozo have what it takes?
“When I visited Tuscany,” told me Galea of Ager, “what struck me is that our programs are more genuine than the same activities in Tuscany – ours are less commercial and contrived. So there is no question that Gozo indeed has what it takes.”
In Gozo’s tapestried landscape, small fields are interspersed with natural habitats and flat-topped hills and deep valleys, and the dramatic coastline is characterised by sheer cliffs and mini-fjords on the south coast, and a series of bluffs and scenic bays on the north coast. Self-contained towns have old centres of charming baroque townhouses, and the island’s most striking sound is the toll of the church bells emanating from churches that dominate the vistas with their large presence (Gozo has 57 churches). Add to this a handful of other eminent attractions – Ggantija Temples (the oldest building in the world), the Citadel (a medieval walled castle), the best scuba diving in the Mediterranean – and you have an island that’s a unique microcosm of the quintessential Mediterranean. And rural tourism, in this context, completes the eclectic mix, bringing out all the other strengths by drawing the focus on the history and nature of the island.
At face value, there is consensus about the merits of rural tourism, and the government adopted eco-tourism for Gozo as its official policy last year, even promising to turn Gozo into ‘a model of sustainable development’. But start digging, and a conflicting and troubled picture emerges. To start with, the government’s “consultation process” that was launched several months ago remains obscure (Galea pointed out that “no one has invited me to share the story of Ager Foundation’s success is this so-called ‘consultation process’”). The government doesn’t seem to have a coherent plan. Rather, public pronouncements by the government even appear to be contradictory. There is frequent talk, for example, of ‘upmarket tourism’ despite the fact that rural tourism is mid-range family-oriented tourism. The government has also been boasting of setting up port facilities to allow cruise liners to dock in Gozo – yet cruise-based day-trippers constitute low-value mass-market tourism. My attempts to get clarifications on these apparent policy contradictions, and learn more about the government’s ideas and priorities for eco-tourism, came to nought - no answers were provides after a wait of two months and repeated promises that my queries would be answered in writing.
More cooperative was the Gozo Tourism Association (GTA), which represents Gozo’s established tourist businesses, an entity that also keeps harping about upmarket tourism (in reality, Gozo doesn’t possess the innovative flair and adequate standard in tourism services to be able to compete in global upmarket stakes). I asked Joe Muscat, secretary-general of the GTA and manager of one of Gozo’s largest hotels, about the GTA’s take on rural tourism and general priorities. He didn’t talk about rural tourism, and his answers were vague and rhetorical, although a digest of the GTA’s priorities include the developments of a golf course (“we have missed the golf course bus,” Muscat said) and an airport (“in order to place Gozo on the upmarket map, we have to improve access to Gozo by introducing a fixed wing [plane] transfer from Malta International Airport to Gozo”).
Muscat’s specific mention of “fixed wing [plane]” is designed to differentiate from the helicopter service that previously operated between the islands, run by a Spanish company that pulled the plug on its Gozo operation after sustaining losses from beginning to end. The business dynamics just don’t gel: low potential volume of passengers means that flights can’t be frequent enough to make the air-service faster than the two hours it takes to travel by car and ferry, and travelling by ferry is much cheaper and more scenic. These dynamics haven’t changed, and even a cheaper-to-run twin-otter plane is a high-risk gamble. But perhaps the GTA has other ideas: a GTA member who didn’t want to be named told me that “they actually imagine that Ryan Air could be operating international flights to Gozo.”
The other things that Muscat mentioned – “more investment in four and five star category hotel rooms”, putting up operas to “target European opera lovers” – are out of sync with Gozo’s qualities and realities. In accommodation, for example, the trend is clearly away from hotels to lodging in flats or farmhouses – there are now 2,700 beds in the latter as opposed to 1,700 beds in hotels. And Gozo’s most successful hotel, which opened at the same time that the three major hotels closed, is a boutique outfit called Maria Giovanna. It’s set in a townhouse, offering 15 en suite rooms kitted with funky modern décor that’s a reinterpretation of old vernacular styles. The low-mid-range Maria Giovanna garners “author’s pick” in international guidebooks and it’s often booked solid in the peak season – and it’s classed as a “hostel” by the Malta Tourism Authority (MTA).
“The problem with the GTA is the non-declared conflict of interest of its members,” said Galea of Ager. “I think that worst than ‘protecting traditional business interests’ they tend to ‘protect’ their own business. For example, they never express concern about public transport. ”
Inadequate transport infrastructure is Gozo’s starkest shortcoming. The bus service is insufficient for touring or getting around, and taxis are also limited and expensive, perhaps the most expensive in the world given the uncontrolled overcharging and distances covered. Car rentals are possible, but people from countries where driving is on the right don’t feel confident driving in Malta on the left. (The government is now promising to improve public transport.)
Another unrelated but eminent problem are the numerous bird hunters who shoot down migratory and wintering birds, an activity that causes repulsion among tourists interested in nature or rural harmony. “When you’re walking and you hear shooting, it’s a disturbance, and Gozo is so small that you can’t get away from it,” told me John Michael Mizzi, who organises nature walks. “I have had people who say, ‘I like the walks but I’m not coming back to Gozo because of the hunting.’”
Mizzi runs the web-based Gozo Country Experiences on a part-time basis, doing imaginative walks in the countryside. He had about 1,500 customers last year, and he charges a nominal fee – the operation is more of a hobby than a business. He can’t do otherwise as government inspectors keep close tabs on him because his business is in a legal grey area. The law entails a tour operator to have a brick-and-mortar office and specially-licensed vehicles and licensed guides (even though no licensed guide does the offbeat walks that Mizzi does), and getting the permits is a complex and expensive undertaking. Mizzi is allowed to operate for as long as he stays away from ‘tourist sights’, and stays small and low-key. Yet he is in a quandary: his venture doesn’t generate enough money to make an office viable, and if he had to open an office then he would have to charge the high fees that his customers wouldn’t pay.
There are other people like Mizzi who operate under the radar, and they didn’t want to speak on the record out of fear of persecution. These people offer the kind of personalised service that their clients value. After all, working on a farm or fishing with a fisherman in his small vernacular boat would loose its meaning if there are a dozen other tourists mindlessly tramping around.
Most people in fact didn’t want to speak on the record. Galea is an exception as he’s used to outspokenness as an activist with Malta’s green party. Galea said: “Small business organisations are charged hefty license fees, and if they prepare food for customers then the health inspectors start to impose draconian conditions. The MTA should encourage small entrepreneurs to offer a service that’s qualitative enough, but not sanitised to the point that genuine atmosphere is lost. As things stand now, initiatives by small cottage industries are stifled by the regulatory framework.”
Galea, who single-handedly runs Ager Foundation, has turned down offers by tour operators to accommodate large groups on a farm. He also has a shortage of hosts – farmers and fishermen – because he can only work with the small number who have the aptitude for service and maintain a certain standard in areas such as hygiene. Still, a lunch at a farmer’s house is bound to be slightly rugged and the service more warm than professional – but that’s part of the allure.
Ager Foundation has flourished. In its first year in operation it was shortlisted for the British ‘First Choice Responsible Tourism Award’, and it’s now highly recommended in guidebooks. There are times when Galea has more clients than he can place among the farmers and fishermen he works with; yet Galea is still pestered by government inspectors. Xavier Hancock, the founder of Gozo Adventures, managed to set up the company in accordance with the law mostly thanks to a grant he got from the EU.
The operating environment is easier for farmhouses, which are mostly leased directly from the owners. These farmhouses – about 200 years old and the icing on the cake for Gozo’s rural tourism – have been converted into modern pads without loosing their character. They are evocative with their large rooms and elegant loggias and expansive courtyard; their limestone walls are gnarled by erosion, and they have charming features such as wall recesses and mangers and ornate balconies. There are hundreds of them on the market now, a range that is bewildering in terms of location, amenities, and price – there is no classification system or guide to aid potential guests in making the choice best suited for them.
Yet the greatest threat to Gozo’s nascent rural tourism is property developments. Gozo’s idyllic rural character has made it a hot destination for well-off European retirees and Maltese buying second homes for weekend retreats. It has also fuelled property speculation – a third of Gozo’s houses are currently vacant – and big businesses are manoeuvring to push through with lucrative property developments in the guise of tourism development. After all, the hotels that have folded stand to make big money from home sales after being redeveloped into luxury homes.
Now Hotel Ta Cenc has lodged an application to add dozens of bungalows and villas. The hotel is classified as five-star, but it falls short of the international five-star standard; most reviewers in Trip Advisor are critical. Given the present situation, with floundering tourism and hotels closing down, the plan for a substantial expansion might seem brazenly confident. But then again, given the location on top of Gozo’s most scenic stretch of cliffs on one side and sweeping views of the island on the other side, the property would command high prices if reconfigured and sold as luxury homes.
In a large country it would be possible to have different things in different regions, but Gozo is a small, singular space. Hence any large developments that are being considered or countenanced by the government despite going against the spirit of its own policies – such as a yacht marina with accommodation complex, the enlargement of the port, the expansion of Ta Cenc, and other large-scale property developments – will impinge on Gozo’s rural character and undermine the viability of rural tourism.
“Unfortunately,” Galea lamented, “a few speculators are prospering while Gozo continues to lose its cultural and environmental heritage. Unemployment is increasing with the decline in tourism. But I think the government is not only inconsistent, it also lacks the political will. And officials feel a deep sense of helplessness as people with connections get their way, especially in the environment and planning sector.”
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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