Well, it’s not really a road, but rather a rough, well-beaten stone track. The road in question is Martin Scicluna Street and it was really tough to negotiate in a car.

Residents told TMID that they had lived in the street for 17 years, yet no one had ever surfaced the road. The area is not lit and there are gaps in the road level of up to about five inches. A part of it was surfaced with concrete, but this was done at the expense of one of the residents.

“You literally need a 4x4 vehicle to drive through here. Unless you know the lay of the land, you can very easily knock the silencer out from under the car,” said one resident.

He said that the residents themselves had complained to the Swieqi local council and to various ministers. “The council said they can patch up roads, but they do not have the funds to actually build a road. So we went to various ministers and we were just bumped along from one to the next. In short, no one was bothered,” he said.

He did however admit that someone eventually, last year, agreed to have the track levelled. “What they did was cover it with sand, which in the summer choked our houses. When winter came, the rain first washed the bulk of the sand down the street. What was left turned into a mud quagmire that later baked in the sun and became even more dust. So it was a bit of a disaster really,” said one man who has lived in the street for six years.

There are two other streets that are simply sandy tracks – Triq id-Dielja and Triq il-Veduta. Another resident explained that Triq il-Veduta had a big hump on it and it was supposed to be made one level. “But that never happened, so in winter, this road and the junction between Martin Scicluna Street and Triq id-Dielja floods.”

The residents said they were not asking for much. “We all pay our road taxes, so why should we have to live like this? It’s like something out of the middle ages. All we want is a road surface.”

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