The Valletta Happy Hour Crawl: Five Bars in One Evening, All Within a Ten-Minute Walk

Most happy hour advice is a list. Ten bars, alphabetical, no idea which one to go to first. That's fine if you're having one drink. It's useless if you're having an evening.

Valletta is the one place in Malta where you can do better than a list, for two reasons. The first is obvious the moment you walk in: the city is about a kilometre end to end, laid out on a grid, and you can cross it in ten minutes without ever getting in a car. The second is less obvious, and it's the whole point of this post.

Valletta's happy hours stagger. They don't all run five till seven. They open at different times, they close at different times, and the gaps between them line up almost suspiciously well. One bar's last call is another's opening hour. Chain them in the right order and you can drink at happy hour prices from five in the afternoon until eight at night without once paying full price — or walking more than a few streets.

Here's how.

What's actually on in Valletta

We track ten Valletta bars with verified happy hours. The thing worth knowing before you plan anything: eight of the ten run seven days a week. This isn't a Friday-only city. A Tuesday in Valletta has nearly the same happy hour coverage as a Saturday, which is not true of Paceville and not really true of Sliema either.

The shape of the day looks like this:

• From noon, Monday to Thursday — Cheeky Monkey Gastropub opens the day and then simply doesn't stop. Its Monday-to-Thursday happy hour runs twelve hours straight, midday to midnight. That is not a typo. It's the longest happy hour in Valletta by five clear hours, and one of the longest anywhere in Malta — only two bars on the whole island run a longer window, and they beat it by exactly one minute.
• From 1pm — DOPO and The Capitol City Bar are already pouring. Capitol City runs a full seven hours, 1pm to 8pm, every single day.
• Mid-afternoon — Caffe Cordina opens its window at 3pm, as does Kantina.
• Late afternoon — La Bottega from 4pm, Tico Tico from 4pm, Rocks Valletta from 5pm.
• Evening — Lolita Bar from 6pm, and Kennedy Bar & Bistro doesn't start until 7pm.

That last group matters. In most Maltese towns, happy hour is over by seven and you're left paying full price for the rest of the night. In Valletta there are bars whose happy hour hasn't started by then.

The route: Friday, from 5pm

This is the itinerary our crawl planner builds for a Friday evening starting at five. It isn't a hand-picked list — it's the route that comes out when you ask the question "which happy hour is closest to closing, and how far do I have to walk to reach it?" The bar with a deadline wins, because that's the drink you'll lose if you dawdle.

1. La Bottega — 5:00pm

Start here, because it closes first. La Bottega's Friday window ends at 6pm, so it's the one with the shortest fuse. Aperol Spritz and Cuba Libre are €8, with the rest of the cocktail list landing between €8 and €9.75.

Have one, maybe two. Leave by quarter to six.

2. Kantina Cafe & Wine — 5:45pm

Two minutes' walk. Kantina sits in one of the nicest spots in the city, tucked beside St John's Co-Cathedral with tables out in the square, and its happy hour runs until 7pm — so you've got breathing room here. This is the stop to actually sit down at.

3. Cheeky Monkey Gastropub — 6:35pm

Cheeky Monkey's Friday window also closes at 7pm, so you're arriving with about twenty-five minutes to use. That's deliberate: it's a short, sharp stop. Order fast.

4. DOPO — 7:00pm

Straight on to DOPO as Cheeky Monkey's window shuts. DOPO is the best-rated bar on this route by some distance — 4.6 stars across 434 reviews — and the happy hour covers classic cocktails and spritzes until 7:30pm.

If you only do one stop on this whole route properly, make it this one.

5. The Capitol City Bar — 7:30pm

The finale, and the best deal of the night: two-for-one on all cocktails, running until 8pm. You've arrived with half an hour left and a two-for-one in front of you, which is exactly the right way to end a happy hour crawl.

After 8pm you're paying full price everywhere on this route — but by then you're in the middle of Valletta at night, which is not the worst place to be stranded.

Total walking: a few hundred metres. Valletta is barely a kilometre end to end, so no leg of this is more than a few minutes.

If you start at four instead

Starting an hour earlier changes the route completely, which is the part people don't expect. From 4pm the planner opens at Kantina, then works through La Bottega and Caffe Cordina — whose happy hour is buy one get one free on all cocktails, and which closes at 6pm — before finishing at Cheeky Monkey and DOPO.

You get Cordina's two-for-one and a longer evening. The trade-off is that you finish around half seven rather than eight, and you miss Capitol City entirely.

Two different evenings, same city, one hour apart.

And if you're reading this on a Tuesday: ignore the clock entirely. Cheeky Monkey is pouring at happy hour prices from midday until midnight, so you can build the whole night around it and pick up the others as their windows open and close around you.

The bit nobody tells you

Happy hour times in Valletta change by day of the week, and not in the way you'd guess. La Bottega runs until 8pm Monday to Thursday but only until 6pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday — the weekend window is shorter, not longer.

Cheeky Monkey does the same thing, harder. Midday to midnight Monday through Thursday — and then just 2pm to 7pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. If you turn up at nine on a Friday expecting what you got on a Tuesday, you have missed it by two hours.

Kennedy Bar & Bistro is stranger still. Its happy hour runs on Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday — and not on Friday or Saturday, the two nights you'd most expect it. And Caffe Cordina's window doesn't run on Sundays at all.

So a route that works beautifully on a Wednesday can fall apart on a Saturday. That's the single most common way people get this wrong: they read a list once, and assume it holds all week.

It doesn't. Check the day.

Practical notes

• Getting there. The Valletta ferry from Sliema takes ten minutes and drops you at the bottom of the city. It's cheaper than parking and considerably less stressful. From the ferry it's an uphill walk or the Barrakka Lift.
• Don't drive. Parking in Valletta is genuinely difficult, and this is a drinking route.
• Sunday is different, not quieter. Cordina's happy hour doesn't run — but Kennedy's does, and Sunday is one of only four days it does. The route changes shape rather than shrinking.
• Times change. Bars adjust their hours without telling anyone, which is the entire reason this site exists. Every window above was verified against the venue, but check the live page before you commit to a route.

Build your own

The route above is one output of a planner that takes your start time, your day, and how long you want to spend at each bar, then routes you through whatever's actually live. Change the start time by an hour and you get a different night out.

• Plan a Valletta crawl →
• See every Valletta happy hour, live right now →

One evening, five bars, no taxis, and nothing at full price until eight.