The Tarxien Temples stand in the southern Maltese town of Ħal Tarxien, surrounded today by streets and houses rather than an untouched landscape. That contrast is part of the visit: monumental limestone buildings created thousands of years ago occupy a compact archaeological enclosure within a living community. Heritage Malta says the complex was discovered in 1913, after a farmer struck large stone blocks while ploughing. Excavations revealed several connected structures, not one solitary shrine.
UNESCO dates Malta’s megalithic temples broadly to the fourth and third millennia BCE and includes Tarxien in a serial World Heritage property with other prehistoric complexes on Malta and Gozo. Heritage Malta gives a more specific construction range of about 3600 to 2500 BCE. These dates place the buildings among the earliest surviving free-standing stone architecture, but they do not mean that every part was erected at once. The complex contains successive spaces and evidence of building phases.
