The Xara Palace
Mdina, Malta · 5-star Hotel Price swings 222%
The Xara Palace in photographs
When to go
The cheapest month we have found is November, at around USD 329 a night - -7% against what this hotel usually asks.
Where to book
- Book on Booking.com - Free cancellation options, guest reviews and a familiar checkout.
- Book direct with the hotel - Usually the best price, and the only route where a loyalty discount applies.
- Hotel website - Photos, facilities and location.
Our notes
The Xara Palace
The Xara Palace is a Relais & Chateaux boutique hotel in a converted 17th-century palazzo in Mdina, Malta's former capital. According to the hotel it is the only hotel inside the walls of the Silent City, and its rooms and terraces look out over the Maltese countryside. The address is Misrah il-Kunsill, in the heart of the old town.
There are seventeen individually designed rooms and suites, described by the hotel as light and intimate in feel, with comfortable, traditional furnishings. The range includes a Presidential Suite, a Duplex Suite, and Deluxe rooms and suites with panoramic views or a panoramic porch. Family rooms are available on request.
The hotel has four restaurants, including The de Mondion, The Medina Restaurant and Trattoria AD 1530, and also offers private dining and wedding receptions in the palace setting. Malta itself, the hotel notes, is an archipelago in the central Mediterranean with fortified cities, megalithic temples and fishing villages. Photographs: the hotel's own website, xarapalace.com.mt.
The area
Valletta is barely 350 years old by Mediterranean standards, and it was built in one deliberate move: after the Knights of St John survived the Great Siege of 1565, Grand Master Jean de Valette laid out a fortress city on the peninsula the Ottomans had failed to take, on a strict grid designed by Francesco Laparelli so that no street would trap defenders in a dead end. It became the capital in 1571 and has stayed astonishingly dense ever since - roughly 320 individual monuments packed into half a square kilometre, which is most of why UNESCO listed the whole city in 1980 and why walking it can feel like touring one continuous palace.
Mdina, the walled hilltop town twenty minutes inland, is the older story: a fortified settlement for over 4,000 years, capital of Malta under the Phoenicians, Romans and Arabs alike, and still shaped by the maze of narrow, deliberately confusing streets the Arab period laid out to slow down raiders and hold onto shade. When the Knights moved the capital down to the coast and built Valletta, Mdina emptied out and went quiet almost overnight - which is exactly how it earned the nickname it still carries, the Silent City. A handful of noble families never left, and their honey-stone palaces are the reason it is worth the trip out from the harbour: less monumental than Valletta, and considerably stranger.
What it costs through the year
| Cheapest we have seen | USD 329 ≈ €294 |
|---|---|
| What it usually costs | USD 354 ≈ €316 |
| Dearest we have seen | USD 1,116 ≈ €998 |
| Times we looked | 17 |
| Gap between the two | 222% |
| Last checked | 2026-10-29 |