Għar Dalam Cave and Museum

Malta’s oldest prehistoric site of Għar Dalam engages visitors to take a journey to a time before human habitation, when animals such as elephants, hippopotami, and red deer roamed the pristine wilderness of the Ice Age. No such animals have lived on the Maltese Islands for thousands of years. Rows of ancient animal bones, unearthed from Għar Dalam cave, are exhibited in the Joseph Baldacchino Hall, which still retains one of a handful of Victorian-style displays in Europe. The George Zammit Maempel Hall presents the historical aspects of the cave in a more didactic manner, as well as detailed displays on the various species discovered in Malta’s Pleistocene (‘Ice Age’) deposits. Even more Pleistocene animal fossils are still visible inside the cave. A series of archaeological excavations held in the cave in the latter half of the 19th century revealed an extensive amount of animal bones, the earliest of which were deposited over 160,000 years ago. Due to the climatic fluctuations of th