The parasail wing that carries visitors over Spinola Bay began as military hardware: in the early 1960s the French engineer Pierre-Marcel Lemoigne patented an ascending gliding parachute so paratroopers could be towed aloft for training. Sport followed the military by roughly a decade.
By the mid-1970s the slotted canopy had been redesigned for tourism and the winch boat had replaced the tow vehicle, allowing take-off and landing from a deck rather than a runway. Modern parasailing Malta Sliema tours inherit that equipment almost intact: a harness, a spreader bar, a long towline and a powered launch.
Spinola Bay is older than any of it. St. Julian's grew from a fishing hamlet named for San Giuliano, whose chapel stood on the slope above the water. In 1688 Fra Paolo Raffaele Spinola, a knight of the Order of St John, built the palace that still overlooks the inlet and gave the bay its name. For two centuries the water below carried luzzus, the painted fishing boats marked at the prow with the Eye of Osiris, whose descendants remain moored at Spinola Jetty.
The bay matters now because of its shape. It is narrow, deep, and shielded from the prevailing northwesterly majjistral by the ridge running toward Paceville, while the open channel toward Sliema and Marsamxett Harbour stays rougher. That geometry made it a natural harbour; it now makes it a natural launch site for Spinola Bay parasail flights. From altitude the coast resolves into one legible sequence: the neo-Gothic Carmelite church at Balluta Bay, the 98-metre Portomaso tower behind the marina, the ferries crossing toward Valletta, and beyond them the limestone bastions of the capital.
Malta's watersports economy is a thin recent layer over that history. The islands drew roughly three million tourist arrivals in 2025, and the coastal strip from St. Julian's to Sliema absorbs a large share of them. Operators work under Transport Malta licensing, with wind limits and daily equipment inspections written into the rules rather than left to judgement. The jetty remains small, the palace remains where it was, and the fishing boats have not left.
What a visitor holds with parasailing Malta Sliema tickets is an angle: a working bay seen from above, a village that has been rearranging itself around the same sheltered water for more than three centuries.
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