Villa St Ignatius

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Villa St Ignatius is a historic villa in Balluta, St Julian’s, Malta. It was built in the early 1800s for English merchant John Watson and was originally called Bel-Vedere. It is one of Malta’s earliest Gothic Revival buildings, with features like crenellated rooftops and pointed Gothic arches.

In 1846, the villa became a Protestant college to train missionaries. It is noted for work on translating the Bible into Modern Standard Arabic under Samuel Gobat. The college closed in 1865. In 1872 the property was sold, and the Jesuits were invited to open a Catholic college. From 1877 to 1881 they added extensions, and a church dedicated to Saint Ignatius of Loyola was completed nearby in 1881. St Ignatius’ College became a leading Maltese school and later a boarding school, with classrooms, a gym, laboratories and sports facilities. It also served as Malta’s meteorological center from 1883 to 1906.

The college closed in July 1907, and St Aloysius’ College opened in Birkirkara later that year. During World War I, the building became St Ignatius Hospital, a military hospital with about 155 beds. In 1917 it was turned into a hospice for patients with mental illness and later housed nearly 200 patients. It closed in 1919. The villa was then divided into tenements, and much of the surrounding land was built over, including the Balluta Buildings in the 1920s. By the 1930s it even housed the Melita Football Club, and by the 1970s the area was filled with apartment blocks, hiding the villa from Balluta Bay.

In 2017, part of the building was demolished after a court order, sparking strong criticism from heritage groups. Plans in 2018 to demolish the whole villa were proposed, but the Planning Authority rejected the idea of scheduling the building. A court later ruled that the partial demolition violated the order, and penalties could follow for those responsible. The future of Villa St Ignatius remains uncertain. Architecturally, it is seen as an early example of Gothic Revival in Malta, and the front balcony was removed during the 2017 demolition work. The building’s red ochre color with white trim, seen in the early 20th century, is still remembered.