Rabat is a word you’ll hear a lot in Malta and its smaller sister island of Gozo. The word is of Semitic derivation and roughly means suburb but is more commonly used to mean a principal town or city; the capital of Morocco is called Rabat, and on Gozo, the main town of Victoria is less formally known as ‘rabat’. In the centre of the island of Malta, though, is the Rabat that is better known to foreign tourists; Rabat is so called because it was a suburb of Mdina, which was once the capital of Malta. People mistakenly view Rabat as some less interesting appendage to Mdina; it’s hardly ...
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