Blue Lagoon, Comino

What the water actually does

Start with the geography, because the rest of the page falls out of it. What you swim in here is a strait, with Comino on one side of you and the small islet of Cominotto on the other, rather than a bay cut back into a coastline. Land sits close on both flanks, the bottom is sand rather than weed or stone, and the whole of it runs shallow. The clarity is genuinely exceptional, which is why every photograph of the place looks like the last one. On a still morning you can watch your own shadow travel across the bottom.

What the shallowness takes away is distance. A confident swimmer crosses the channel in a few minutes and then finds themselves looking at rock, which is a strange thing to say about the most photographed water in the country but it is the truth. This is a place to float in, to snorkel along the edges of and to stand about in absurdly bright sea. It is not a place to put lengths in. The water around the corner, off the rock on the Comino side, runs deeper and collects a fraction of the people.

Getting in, and what is underfoot

There is a small amount of sand and a great deal of flat rock, and the sand goes first. Ending up on the stone along the edges is not a punishment. Rock gives you depth within a stroke or two and nobody kicking grit into the water in front of you, which is the same argument this site makes about the Maltese coastline generally, and which St Peter's Pool makes in its purest form. Something on your feet is worth more here than an extra towel.

Entry itself is gentle wherever you settle. The channel shelves slowly and there is no sudden drop near the shore to catch you by surprise, which is why it reads as an easy stretch of water for a young or nervous swimmer once you are actually standing in it.

Shade, current and what the wind does to the water

Comino sits between two larger landmasses, and that shape does more to the water than the photographs let on. Sheltered from some directions, the channel stays flat enough that a nervous swimmer can feel entirely safe in it. Open to others, the same gap can carry a firmer through current than the calm surface suggests, and a floater who drifts without noticing can end up further from their own boat than they meant to. We are reading that off the geography rather than off any measurement we have taken, and we would rather say so plainly than dress it up as data.

Shade follows the same shape. The ground either side of the channel is low and pale, and nothing standing on it keeps a shadow over the water for more than part of the afternoon. Bring your own cover, your own water and something for your feet, because none of the three is waiting for you on an island where almost nobody lives.

Who the swimming suits, and when it stops working

Crowding changes the swim itself, not just the view from the rock. At the height of the season, the middle of the day packs enough people into a narrow, shallow channel that floating clear of anyone else becomes the hard part, and snorkelling along the edges means looking at legs rather than sand. None of that is a comment on the water, which is exactly as clear as it always is. It is a comment on how much of it any one swimmer actually gets to use.

Early and late are a different place in the water, not just a quieter one. Fewer bodies means the channel genuinely opens up: you can swim a real line across it, hold still long enough to watch the bottom, and find a stretch of rock to yourself. Who this suits shifts with the hour too. A family with small children does fine even in a packed channel, because the water stays shallow enough that crowding is more social than risky. A swimmer who wants to cover distance or snorkel undisturbed needs the quiet version, and that mostly means early, late, or the months either side of the peak: May, June or September.

A rough sea empties the channel out entirely, since crossings stop before the swimming does. A packed midday channel in August is the other way to lose the swim, whatever the colour looks like from the rock.

The boat, which is just the way in

None of the above happens without a boat first. There are no cars on Comino and hardly anybody lives there permanently, so every visit begins on a crossing. Departures reach the island from Ċirkewwa and from Mellieħa on the Malta side, and from Mġarr on Gozo, so wherever you are staying there is a way across within reach of you.

A straight ferry drops you at the lagoon and comes back for you, and the crossing itself is the whole trip. A cruise that calls at the caves and the open water around the island folds the lagoon into a longer day and hands you less time actually in this water. Pick the shape of day you want rather than assuming one crossing is simply better than the other.

The column beside this article lists what we can actually put you through to, at the prices the partners themselves published when we last checked. Fifteen options between three operators is more choice than the swimming needs, so use the sections above to decide whether this is your day, and the sidebar once you already know that it is. What happens to be trading on the island itself, and what it charges, we will not describe: that moves with the season, and a stale answer is worse than none.

Where this doesn't suit you

This is not the place for a swimmer chasing distance, and no choice of hour changes that: the channel is narrow enough that a strong swimmer runs out of it in minutes whichever direction they pick. There is no shade beyond what you carried in, no way to cool off in open water once the sun sits directly overhead, and no way to leave early once your boat has gone without you. None of that changes what the water is like at the right hour, which is still the clearest, calmest place to float in these islands. It just will not be that at every hour, and expecting otherwise is the only real way to get this beach wrong.

Questions worth asking first

Last checked: 14 September 2026. Sailings, partner prices and the state of the sea all change, so verify whatever your day depends on before you set out. No admission figure, timetable or water temperature appears above, because none of them would still be right by the time you read it.