Most Popular PlacesRandom PlaceListsItinerariesAdd a PlaceDownload the App The Street Shrines of Victoria Muurhuizen (Wall Houses) The Red Tower of Death Tomba Dei Gigante S’Ena e Thimes Where to See the World’s Creepiest Dolls and Toys 11 days ago More than fifty centuries-old religious shrines hide in the walls and above the doorways of Gozo’s capital, and most visitors walk straight past them. Look up as you walk the old lanes of Victoria, Gozo's capital, and you'll start seeing them: small religious shrines — niċeċ in Maltese — set into house walls and above doorways. Some are elaborate stone niches holding carved saints under Baroque canopies; others are simple painted figures behind glass, with a vase of plastic flowers and a lamp someone still lights at night.
There are more than fifty surviving in the town, some over three hundred years old. They were built by householders, not the Church — a family's way of putting its patron saint or the Virgin on public view and asking for protection over the door. The Immaculate Conception, St Joseph, St Francis and the Sacred Heart appear again and again, each in a different hand.
Together they form an open-air gallery of Maltese folk devotion that most visitors miss on the way to the Citadel. Nobody maintains them as a set. A few have been restored by their owners; others are slowly losing their paint, or vanishing behind air-conditioning units and new render.
The niches are now being photographed and catalogued, and three short self-guided walks link the best of them, starting a few minutes from the Citadel gate. Get more unusual and extraordinary places each week with the Atlas Obscura Places newsletter. Your newsletter subscriptions with us are subject to Atlas Obscura's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
All the shrines are on public streets and can be seen free at any hour; several are best in morning or late-afternoon light. The lanes around the Citadel are stepped and uneven, so wear flat shoes. Free self-guided walking routes with a map and photographs of each shrine, under an hour each, are at niccec.com/walking-tour.
Hilltop modernist/folk art shrine and gardens dedicated to a Native American saint. One of Africa’s most important Marian shrines was once a slave trading port. Once the site of medieval pilgrimage for its healing powers, this well was lost and later rediscovered.
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