Key takeaways
- The wooden village in Anchor Bay was built as the set for a live-action Popeye musical released in 1980, and it was never dismantled afterwards.
- What was meant to be temporary is now a paying visitor attraction with its own entrance, up on the land at the head of the bay.
- The boat does not land, so the village appears as it was designed to appear on film: a cluster of crooked houses stacked around a small bay.
- Anchor Bay is a narrow inlet in high cliffs, and it was chosen for the film because it looked like nowhere else. That is still true.
Why there is a village in this bay
In the late nineteen-seventies a film production came to Malta looking for a place to build the harbour town of Sweethaven for a live-action musical of Popeye. They needed a small, steep-sided bay that could pass for an isolated fishing port and that had nothing modern in shot, and they found Anchor Bay on the north-west coast.
The set was not a facade. A whole village of wooden buildings was constructed at the head of the bay, crooked and top-heavy and painted in colours that belong in a cartoon, using timber and other materials brought in for the purpose. It took months to build.
The film came out in 1980 and did not become the hit anybody hoped for. The village, however, was still standing, and Malta had acquired a permanent wooden town that had never been a town.
What happened to it afterwards
Film sets are normally struck and the site returned. This one was not, partly because it was substantial enough to be worth keeping and partly because people started turning up to look at it almost immediately.
Over the following decades it turned into a visitor attraction in its own right, with an entrance, upkeep and a steady programme of maintenance that a set built for a few months of filming never anticipated needing. Wooden buildings on a Mediterranean coast require constant attention.
The result is a strange object: a piece of nineteen-seventies production design preserved for longer than the film it was built for has been remembered, and now visited by people who have never seen it.
Crooked painted houses at the head of a narrow inlet, cliffs on both sides
How it looks from a boat
The set was designed to be filmed from the water, which is exactly where a catamaran sees it from. The village faces out into the bay and stacks up the slope behind, so from a deck you get the composition the production designers intended rather than the one a ticket holder gets walking through it.
The colours are the surprise. Against pale limestone cliffs and dark blue water, a cluster of crooked buildings painted in reds, blues and yellows looks entirely unreal, which was the intention and remains the effect.
It is also small. Photographs tend to fill the frame with it and the reality is a modest huddle of structures in a narrow inlet, dwarfed by the cliffs around it. That contrast is more interesting than the set alone.
The bay itself
Anchor Bay is worth attention independently of what has been built at the end of it. It is a narrow, deep inlet cut into high cliffs, sheltered from most directions, and the reason the film chose it is that it looks like an enclosed harbour without being one.
The name predates the film by a long way. This stretch of coast was used for anchoring and for small-scale quarrying, and the cliffs around the inlet carry the marks of both, which is a more genuinely Maltese layer of history than the wooden houses at the head of it.
The water in the inlet is deep and dark, sheltered enough to be calm on days when the open coast is not, which is precisely why a boat might choose it as a stop when the wind is up. Shelter is the quality that decides an anchorage, and this one has it from almost every direction that matters.
1980
The film the village was built for came out in 1980 and was not the hit anyone hoped for. The set outlasted it and became the reason people know the bay.
Whether the boat stops here
Anchor Bay is one of the named possible stops after the Blue Lagoon, and like all of them it depends on the conditions. On a day when the sea allows, the catamaran can come into the inlet and you see the village from the water.
There is no landing. The set has its own entrance on the land side and visiting it properly is a separate excursion with a ticket, reached by road. From the boat you are looking at it, not walking through it.
For most people that is the right amount of Popeye Village. It is a curiosity rather than a destination, it photographs extremely well from a deck, and seeing it as a strange splash of colour at the end of a cliff-walled inlet is arguably the best version of it.
Is it worth caring about
If you came to Malta for Baroque architecture and prehistoric temples, a disused musical set is not going to be the highlight of your week, and nobody should pretend otherwise. It is a piece of film history in an unlikely place.
What makes it worth the ten minutes is the accident of it. Almost nothing built for a film survives its release, and this one outlived its own obscurity to become the thing people know the bay for, which is a genuinely odd outcome.
And it does something useful for the day on the water: it breaks up a sequence of beautiful bays with one that is beautiful and also faintly ridiculous, which is a better rhythm than six hours of unbroken scenery. A day of nothing but perfect coastline is harder to remember afterwards than a day with one absurd wooden town in the middle of it.
