Gozo farmhouse

Because of the many foreign occupations that Maltese islands have been through, the trading roads that were opened across the Mediterranean Sea and its numerous original influences, Malta and Gozo earned a very rich architectural heritage.

It has a double wall made of raw stone in order to protect the owner from hot summers, and its ceiling is usually dome-shaped.

Back between 800 BC and AD 1200, Maltese islands were clearly part of the North African block, in opposition with what is stated nowadays with the European Union (2004).

[citation needed] This is under those influences the primitive razzett - or farmhouse - began to take the shape we know nowadays and make them so famous among visitors and tourists.

[citation needed] In Companion to Contemporary Architectural Thought,[6] Ben Farmer, Dr Hentie J. Louw, Hentie Louw and Adrian Napper linked the shapes of farmhouses of Malta and Gozo with cultural habits and needs from this period: In about 1600, the introduction of the practice of living in closed settlements for security reasons in medieval Malta led to a reinterpretation of the basic cubic farmhouse layout.

The earlier type consisted of a closely knit web of winding streets and alleys radiating from a central square, echoing the introverted central courtyard of the farmhouse building; the later type, most popular on Malta's sister island of Gozo, consisted of a sprawling pattern based on open-ended streets and alleys leading into the countryside, offering less security and introversion but infinitely more visual rapport with the terraced fields around the settlement.Originally most farmhouses are inherited[7][8] by parents of Gozitan ascendency.

As more than one million tourists visit Maltese islands each year, houses of character were restored and instead of selling them, owners often converted them to fit the security and comfort requirements people on vacancy have.