The Sliema to Gżira Happy Hour Walk: Five Bars, One Seafront, Under Two Kilometres

Sliema and Gżira are two names for what is, on foot, one place. The promenade runs unbroken from Sliema Point around the front and down into Gżira, and you can walk the whole thing in half an hour without crossing anything worse than a side street.

We track eighteen verified happy hours along that line — eleven in Sliema, seven in Gżira. That is more than any other area we cover — Valletta has ten, Paceville six — and they sit along a single walkable line rather than scattered across a town. The windows are also spread across the evening rather than all switching on at once, which is what makes the stretch walkable as a sequence rather than a choice between neighbours.

I've already written the Valletta version of this, where the trick is that the windows stagger. Sliema and Gżira work differently. Here the story is duration — several windows run for hours rather than minutes, which means the route is forgiving. Miss a stop by twenty minutes and the evening doesn't collapse.

Here's the walk.

The route at a glance

Five bars, 1.9 km end to end, about 24 minutes of actual walking spread across four hours. Every window below is one we've confirmed with the bar. This version is built for a Monday to Thursday evening — two of the five run shorter weekday windows, and I've flagged what changes at the weekend further down.

The walks between them, in order: 617 m, 497 m, 396 m, 378 m — five to eight minutes each, and about 24 minutes on your feet across the whole evening.

The direction matters: you're walking westward, from the Sliema end down into Gżira. Do it in reverse and you'll finish at the far end of Sliema with a longer walk home.

Stop one — Hammett's Monastik, 17:00

Start here for a reason that has nothing to do with geography: it's the only bar on our entire Malta map that publishes what everything costs.

Selected cocktails €6.50. A draught Estaminet pint €3.50. Prosecco by the glass €3.50. Forty-nine bars on the map and this is the one place where you know the number before you order — which makes it a sane place to start an evening you'd like to budget.

The window is 17:00–19:00 Monday to Thursday, and it opens two hours earlier — 15:00 — on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Leave by about 17:30. It's the longest walk of the night from here, roughly 617 metres around the front.

Stop two — Talk of Town, 17:40

This is the cheapest verified drink in Malta.

Talk of Town does two classic cocktails for €8.50, which is €4.25 each — and I've checked that against every other price we hold. Nothing on the map is lower. The window is 17:00–19:00, seven days a week, so unlike most of this route it doesn't care what day you turn up.

It's a small café-bar rather than a destination: 66 Google reviews, against the several thousand its seafront neighbours carry. It isn't on the tourist circuit, which is rather the point.

Leave around 18:10 — about six minutes down the front.

Stop three — The Londoner, 18:20

A pub on the Sliema seafront running one of Malta's more distinctive offers: buy one cocktail, get the second for €1.

That format — the €1 second drink rather than a free one — turns up in a few places on the island and almost nowhere else I've looked. The Brew, thirty-nine metres up the road, runs the same deal on cocktails, gin or beer, but its window is 14:00–16:00 and will have closed hours before you get here. Worth knowing if you're out earlier.

The Londoner's weekday window is 17:00–19:00, so arriving at 18:20 gives you a comfortable forty minutes. On Friday and Saturday it opens at 15:00 instead.

The safety net: if you're running late and the 19:00 windows have closed, Morning Star is sixty-eight metres away and runs happy hour on all cocktails from noon until 21:00, every day. It is the most forgiving window on this stretch and the reason you can improvise here.

Stop four — Suzie Q, 19:05

You've now crossed into Gżira, though nothing on the ground tells you so.

Suzie Q runs 2-for-1 cocktails from 17:00 to 20:00, seven days a week — three full hours, which is why it sits fourth. Arriving at 19:05 leaves you the best part of an hour with the window still open, at the point in the evening when most of Sliema's have shut.

This is where the two towns differ. Sliema's happy hours are mostly done by seven; Gżira's are still going. Gżira prices for the people who live there rather than for the seafront, and the windows run later because the crowd arrives later.

Stop five — White Horse Bar, 20:05

The last stop, and the longest window of the five: 17:00–21:00, Monday to Saturday, buy one get one free on cocktails.

It's a small local pub — fifty-two Google reviews — and it is still pouring at half eight, which no other bar on this route can say.

That's the walk: five bars, four hours, 1.9 kilometres.

If you're still going at nine

There is one more, and it's the most interesting window in either town.

Punto Bar & Dine runs two happy hours a day, seven days a week: noon to six, and then again from 21:00 to midnight. That second window is close to unique in Malta — almost every other happy hour on the island is finished by nine, which is exactly when people who ate dinner first are ready to start.

It's 523 metres back east from White Horse, so you're doubling back slightly. Given it's a 2-for-1 on classic cocktails at eleven at night, most people find they don't mind.

What changes at the weekend

Three things, and two of them are in your favour:

• Hammett's Monastik and The Londoner both open at 15:00 on Friday, Saturday and Sunday instead of 17:00. The whole route can start two hours earlier.
• White Horse is closed on Sunday — its window runs Monday to Saturday. On a Sunday, finish at Suzie Q and go straight to Punto's late one.
• Surfside changes completely on a Sunday, running buy-one-get-one-free on all cocktails from noon until midnight. On a Sunday it's arguably the whole crawl by itself.

A note on doing this sensibly

Five bars across four hours is a long evening, and the arithmetic of a 2-for-1 is that you end up holding two drinks rather than one. Eat somewhere on the way — Morning Star and Punto both do proper food alongside the happy hour — and treat the timings above as permission to go slowly rather than a schedule to keep up with.

Every window here was confirmed with the bar rather than scraped out of old reviews, and the times drift. If you want the version that's right tonight rather than the version that was right when I wrote this, the live map shows what's actually pouring at whatever hour you set it to, and the bar crawl tool rebuilds this route from scratch against tonight's real windows.