When to travel to Malta: weather and seasons

Malta's weather and climate are naturally influenced by the sea and are characteristically Mediterranean, similar to that found in southern Italy or southern Greece. You can roughly divide the year into the summer, rainy and the winter seasons.

The islands have a very sunny climate with a daily average of five to six hours sunshine in mid-winter to more than 12 hours a day in summer. The annual rainfall in Malta is low, averaging 578mm a year, and nearly three-fourths of that falls between October and March; June, July, and August are normally quite dry - the length of the dry season in summer is longer than in neighbouring Italy.

Summer starts in early June, warms up until August and cools down in October, and is obviously the time to spend in or near the sea, fortunately never far away in Malta. However, since humidity is rather high in Malta (it's an island, after all) summer temperatures can feel quite uncomfortable. July and August are Malta's hottest months with daytime temperatures usually above 30ºC (86ºF) and quite often also above 35ºC (95ºF)

Luckily, daytime heat in summer is usually mitigated by cooling sea breezes, especially along the coast. Trade winds blow along the coast most of the year, keeping temperatures pleasant even in the hottest months, except for a few weeks, generally around mid-August to mid-September. Then a very hot and dry wind from Africa called the Xlokk or Sirocco occasionally brings unpleasantly high temperatures.

It is usually mild in Malta during the winter, with plenty of sunshine. This makes Malta a favourite destination for those wanting to escape the northern European winter. Daytime temperatures are usually 15ºC (59ºF) or above and sometimes around 20ºC (68ºF). In fact, temperatures almost never fall below 10ºC (50ºF) during the day, while night-time winter temperatures never get below 0ºC (32ºF).

Although there's no chance of ever finding snow in Malta, you might get periods of strong winds blowing either from the north west or from the north east which can both cause rather unpleasant weather conditions with short, sharp and impressively torrential showers. A light raincoat is definitely advisable for winter! The weather usually shows signs of warming up in April, heralding in a long spell of hot, dry weather.

Climate in Malta

Fahrenheit and centigrade, inches and millimetres, average values.

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