Comino's Trees: ERA Handed Them Over
But Din l-Art Ħelwa says the decision already did the damage.
The chainsaw hasn't arrived yet. But Din l-Art Ħelwa says the decision already did the damage.
The Environment and Resources Authority approved the removal of trees on Comino — clearing the way for the Six Senses development to take shape on an island that has, until now, been defined by what was never built on it. Din l-Art Ħelwa didn't use careful language in response. They called it an act of environmental vandalism. Not a misstep. Not an oversight. Vandalism.
That word is worth sitting with.
Comino is not Sliema. It is not St Julian's with its cranes and its scaffolding and its argument about whether the skyline belongs to the people who live under it or the people who finance it. Comino is the island that survived by being inconvenient — too small, too exposed, too difficult to reach to become what everything else became. Its value, for most people who have ever swum off its coast or sat in its silence, was precisely that nobody had managed to improve it yet.
The Six Senses brand trades on exactly that logic. Pristine. Unspoiled. A place that feels like it hasn't been touched. The architecture of the pitch and the architecture of the approval are pulling in opposite directions, and the trees are what falls between them.
Malta Employers, in the same breath as all of this, reiterated its call for long-term infrastructure planning — the kind of coordinated thinking that treats each decision as part of a pattern rather than an isolated event. They were talking about electricity outages. The grid that failed in the summer heat. But the sentence applies elsewhere. Every approval is infrastructure. Every tree is infrastructure. The question of what kind of island this becomes is made in a hundred small decisions that nobody describes as policy.
In the waters off St Paul's Islands, a 41-year-old diver named Redeemer Grima lost his life carrying out works beneath the surface. He was from Rabat. The sea gave nothing back easily, and the afternoon carried that weight across the whole north coast.
Two things happened on the same stretch of calendar. A man died doing his job in the water. An authority approved the removal of trees on the island that water surrounds.
Neither story is about tourism. Both stories are about what Malta decides it is willing to lose.
The cost of living guide tracks the numbers. The numbers are always easier to track than the other things — the trees, the silence, the particular quality of an island that hasn't been explained to anyone yet.
Six Senses will build something beautiful. They always do.
The question is what was there before it, and whether anyone will remember.
