Hal- Safi and Zurrieq - Windmills Walk
A beautiful walk trough the quaint towns of Safi and Zurrieq.
Żurrieq (Maltese: Iż-Żurrieq) is a town in the Southern Region of Malta. It is one of the oldest towns in the country, and it has a population of 11,823 inhabitants as of March 2014.[1] The first documentation about it being a parish dates back to 1436 dedicated to St. Catherine of Alexandria. The island of Filfla is administratively a part of the town.
The Village of Żurrieq claims for a large area of the South Eastern
part of the Island of Malta, in which village we find a wide collection
going back to the Bronze and Punic times, through the Roman, Knights and
British eras. The village in itself is to a large extent adorned with
houses and buildings of historical value dating to the 15th and 16th
centuries.
We find the first historical reference of this village back in 1400.
The villages of Hal Lew, Hal Millieri, Hal Manin, Bubaqra, Hal Far,
Nigret and Qrendi used to make part of the village itself, until in 1618
the village of Qrendi became a village of its own while the others
dissolved in a natural way with their area now making an integral part
of the village perimeter.
Numerous ruins and remaining structures indicate the flow of the
village through the time. These indicate the various settlements of
peoples that inhabited the village area, from the Phoenicians to the
Carathaginians, Greeks to the Romans. The remains found indicate these
peoples as ancestors to the village, yet without excluding the
possibility of other peoples, this village is rich in ruins and remains
which in future may shed new light on its ancestors. Proof of this may
be seen namely in remains such as the Punic Tower, Xarolla Catacombs,
Cart Ruts at 'Tal-Bakkari', 'Tal-Hlantun Tower' and many others. The windmill is known as tax-Xarolla, was built by Grandmaster Manoel de Vilhena, in 1724. In 1992, this was restored to its original working order is now the
only functioning windmill in the islands of Malta and Gozo. This is a
valuable witness of local culture and heritage still has parts of
theoriginal mechanisms and can still grain the wheat. In the year 2000,
this building was passed over to be administered by the Zurrieq Local
Council and is intended to serve also as a cultural centre.
The formation of the village as known today goes back to about seven hundred years. The village of Ħal Safi was surrounded by four other major villages. Farmers and peasants used to meet there for a chat on their way back home from work. Later a niche was erected there,and in time,as people began to settle in the vicinity, a new village started taking shape.
In 1417, the village was already known as Ħal Safi. According to the 1419 records of the Standing Army (id-Dejma), between eighty and ninety people were considered as village residents. The main occupation of the major part of the residents was farming - breeding of sheep and goats and agriculture.
The origin of the village's name cannot be determined conclusively. Some historians have concluded that the name was derived from the PURE (Safi) AIR of the village. Others insisted that it is similar to Safi in Morocco or that the village was named Ħal Safi since none of its residents was contaminated when an epidemic infected the whole country. Both its coat of arms (a horizontal light-blue stripe on a silver background) and its motto (Sine Macula) emphasize the meaning of its name.
Source - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BBurrieq
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safi,_Malta
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