3 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
By claim the earliest year in Malta on this list is 1732, at the Gleneagles Bar on Gozo — and the Għajnsielem local council's own history of Mġarr harbour says what that year dates: the barrakka, the cabin in which passengers waited for the passage boats. By record there is no answer here at all. Not one of the three houses has produced a licence, a deed or a directory entry, which is why all three are graded C and why two of them sit outside the ranking.
Malta's old drinking rooms are small, private and family-held, and that is the whole difficulty. A Maltese bar is usually one room on a corner or a waterfront, opened by a named man and kept by his son and his grandson, and nothing about that kind of business generates paper a researcher can read a century later. What the island documents superbly is architecture: the Casa del Commun Tesoro in Valletta, built for the treasury of the Order of St John, is scheduled as a Grade 1 national monument, and the National Inventory of the Cultural Property of the Maltese Islands even carries the niche of St Andrew fixed to the wall of a Gozo bar under its own number, 01073. It does not carry the bar. So the dates on this page come from the press and from a village council rather than from a register, and they are years attached to buildings and to families instead of to counters. Our three houses are a caffè under painted ceilings on Valletta's Republic Square, a room above Balluta Bay kept by three generations of one family, and a harbour cabin beside the jetty the Gozo passage boats used. Read together they make one point twice over: in Malta the famous year almost always belongs to something other than the bar.
Caffe Cordina keeps part of the ground floor of the Casa del Commun Tesoro, the house built for the Order of St John’s treasury and later the island’s first post office and a hotel, with tables out on Republic Square and painted ceilings inside. Coffee is sold across the counter to anyone who walks in, which is what admits it here. City of London Bar is the plainest of the three and the most like a pub: a terrace above Balluta Bay facing the Carmelite church across the water, darts, quiz nights and three generations of the Borg family — Karmnu, then Salvu from 1960, then Julian since 1977. Gleneagles Bar sits at Mġarr harbour beside the jetty the passage boats once used, under a sloping roof, and its counter has a literary history: the novelist Philip Nicholson wrote there as A. J. Quinnell, a pen name he assembled from the rugby player Derek Quinnell and the initials of the barman’s son, and the Times of Malta found him at the bar in July 2005 quietly amused by tourists hunting for the author.
If one entry justifies this page it is Cordina. Everything written about Malta’s most famous caffè repeats 1837, and the correction is not ours — it is on the family’s own history page, which says that John Cordina’s great-great-grandparents came from San Gimignano and opened in 1837 in Cospicua, on the other side of the Grand Harbour, selling Italian goods from a horse and cart. A bomb closed that shop during the Second World War. Cesare Cordina bought these rooms from the Casino Maltese in 1944, put in the hot counter and brought the island its first espresso machine in the early 1950s. So coffee has been served at this address for a little over eighty years, and the year on the sign belongs to a grocery in another town two generations earlier. It is a business dating itself from its own beginning, which is what family businesses do, and the family’s own page is where we read it. It is also why the house keeps its page and leaves the ranking, on exactly the reasoning applied to a Seville wine shop and a Vienna spice merchant. The habit of asking what kind of date is being claimed is set out in how historians date an old pub.
Malta’s heritage documentation is good and it is pointed somewhere else. The scheduling of the Casa del Commun Tesoro describes a building begun for the treasury of an order of knights and much altered in 1914, and says nothing about the café on its ground floor. The national inventory numbers a wayside niche on the wall of a Gozo bar and not the bar behind it. No scheduling for the Gleneagles building itself has been traced. Three of the local news sites that would carry the rest refuse an automated request, which is why one of the two sources for the 1732 had to be read through the Internet Archive after the council’s live page disappeared. None of that makes the houses less real. It does mean every Maltese grade on this page is a C, and that a reader who wants a document will not find one here yet.
Three houses is thin even for an island this size, and the gap is ours: Birgu, Bormla, Sliema, Mdina and most of Gozo are unworked here, and the archives that would settle a Valletta counter are not online in the way British and Australian records are. For the nearest comparison — a country where the old room is a counter and the founding year usually dates a shop — see the oldest pubs in Italy and Spain. For how a claim is weighed against a record on this site, read the methodology; the full international ranking is at the top 100 oldest pubs.
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Mġarr, Gozo, Malta
The 1732 comes from the Għajnsielem local council's own account of Mġarr harbour, which says the building went up as the port's barrakka — the cabin where passengers waited for the passage boats — under Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena, and which places it beside an osteria that was still standing when the account was written. English Wikipedia carries the same year and the sloping roof. The year therefore
Valletta, Malta
Cordina's own line is that it has been serving since 1837, and its own history explains what the year belongs to: John Cordina's great-great-grandparents, who came from San Gimignano, set up shop that year in Cospicua, across the Grand Harbour from Valletta, and sold goods from their homeland with a horse and cart. A bomb closed that shop in the Second World War, and Cesare Cordina took these rooms from the Casino
St Julian's, Malta
Two Maltese publications date the bar to 1914: Guide Me Malta, writing in August 2019 that it had stood for a hundred and five years, and Culture Trip in 2017. Both say it opened as British soldiers were being mobilised on the island at the outbreak of the First World War, and both name the founder, Karmnu Borg, whose son Salvu kept it from 1960 and whose grandson Julian has kept it since 1977. Neither cites a
The photographs above are other people's work, used under open licences. Every photographer, licence and source page is named in the image credits. A pub with no licensed photograph shows an illustrated façade instead.
