Pillar 01 · History & Heritage

The Żejtun Roman Villa: What to See and What We Know

The Żejtun Roman Villa is the south of Malta’s most accessible piece of Roman archaeology, and one of the few places on the island where you can stand inside an ancient olive press. This is the practical guide — what you’ll see, what’s still being studied, and what the site won’t tell you on a panel.

This article is a stub. We’re expanding it as we work through current opening times, recent excavation reports, and the small details only a regular visitor will pick up. If you spot something out of date, write in.

What survives on site

The villa was uncovered in 1961 during construction work at what is now the local secondary school, and successive digs since the 1970s have steadily clarified the plan. What you can see today is a Roman agricultural villa — a working farm, not a leisure retreat — organised around the production and storage of olive oil. The most legible feature is the torcularium, the press room, where the stone bedding for the screw press and the channels that fed oil into collection vats are still in position. Around the press room are domestic quarters, water cisterns cut into the bedrock, and what later excavations have identified as a small bath suite.

The villa was occupied from roughly the 1st century BC into the 4th or 5th century AD, with at least two clear building phases. [LOCAL FACT — Mattew to confirm current opening hours, ticket price, and whether guided tours are running.]

Why this villa matters

Roman villas in Malta are not common as visitor sites. The Domus Romana in Rabat is the better-known example, but the Żejtun villa is in many ways more legible: smaller, more focused, and more clearly an industrial site rather than an aristocratic one. The press room, the storage cisterns, and the scale of the operation all point toward a serious commercial olive-oil producer, working land that the Phoenicians had probably already cleared and that the Arabs would later inherit. For visitors, that continuity is the deepest thing the villa offers — not the romance of empire but the long, patient story of one ridge being farmed for the same crop across two thousand years.

What this article will cover

  • How to find the villa (it sits inside the school grounds — there’s a knack to the entrance)
  • What each room was actually for, in plain language
  • The olive-oil economy in Roman Malta and how this villa fits in
  • What the dig has and hasn’t yet found
  • Realistic visit time, accessibility notes, and what to read first
  • How to combine the villa with a wider Żejtun morning

Read more on this pillar

This article is part of our History & Heritage pillar. The villa pairs naturally with our piece on the olive heritage and the broader Żejtun history timeline. If you’d rather build a morning around it, see half a day in Żejtun.

Mattew Cassar

Resident · Writer

Mattew writes zejtun.com from a flat above his grandfather’s old workshop on Triq San Girgor. He has lived in Żejtun for twenty-three of his thirty-one years.