Workers accompanied by police used a mechanical shovel to remove the paving, according to Lovin Malta. The surface had formed part of an enlarged outside footprint serving the restaurant and the new Sliema Centric Hotel.
The dispute was never just about paperwork. Once a structure, tables, chairs and paving start pushing outward onto land everyone else is meant to use, the argument stops feeling abstract. It becomes a familiar Maltese question in concrete form: how easily public space can be treated as overflow for private business.
Residents, the Sliema Local Council and NGOs had all complained about the extension, Lovin Malta reported. Stivala was served with an enforcement notice on 1 October. The structure was dismantled and the tables and chairs were later removed, but the paving stayed put until this intervention.
An eviction notice had also informed Stivala that the occupied area was public land and that he had no title or permit to use it, Lovin Malta reported.
That lingering paving mattered because it was the clearest physical marker that the occupation had not fully ended. A notice is one thing. A cleared site is another.
It remains unclear whether any fines will be issued over the illegalities. On the Strand, at least, the part you could see underfoot is now gone.
Isla Camilleri