This is a museum of the old school, which is not necessarily a good thing. It is situated just inside the walls of Mdina, in an eighteenth century palace, which means that the shell of the place looks pretty fine. Inside is a bit of a mixed bag however, a jumble of everything related to the natural world which the curators were able to get their hands on. You walk inside the door to be confronted by a room full of angry looking big cats, very few of whom can claim Maltese descent. Then there’s a room full of fish, a bones room, a minerals room (this is very much for the purists), a birds room, a room with carefully sculpted models of Malta’s various outlying islands… you probably get the idea.
The interior of the building is in need of a bit of an upgrade, and there is no truck with any of this fancy computerised/ineractive business you find in some museums. Instead you get stuffed animals, models of animals and bones of animals. Plus the minerals, which to my mind should probably be stored in a separate wing to be accessed only by those who really need or want to look at rocks in glass boxes. But aside from that, it’s a shame they don’t emphasise the Maltese fauna a bit more. I love the thought that there were dwarf elephants and hippos wandering around the island, but there aren’t any models of these guys to be found, just the occasional recovered tusk or shin-bone. And what about the snakes? The skinks? The jellyfish? This is what the people want to see.
In summary: if you are only in Malta for a week or so, don’t waste your time in here when there are a lot of better options to be found.
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All a bit tatty, to be fair. Not the best museum on the rock.
Not by a distance… major upgrade needed here, but roads, schools and hospitals (among others) are well ahead in the queue for government money so they might be waiting a while.
Must admit I hurried through the mineral room for fear of appearing interested (yaaaawn).