Mellieha Thunder

I didn't plan to shoot a storm on this particular evening of August 28th, 2024—I was just on the balcony in Mellieħa, watching clouds gather over the Mediterranean. But what followed was something else entirely. For over two hours, the sky over Mellieħa Bay kept lighting up with wave after wave of lightning. Malta doesn't get thunderstorms that often—the Mediterranean climate means most rain falls between October and March—so when a proper summer storm rolls in, it's spectacular.

From the top floor where I was staying, I had a perfect view of the Parish Church of the Nativity of Our Lady and the old streets below spreading down the hillside. The lightning painted the sky electric blue for at least an hour, while the town stayed warm and golden beneath it, lit by streetlights and building illumination. That contrast—chaos in the sky with cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning, calm on the ground with centuries-old limestone buildings—is what made this unforgettable.

I used my camera at its widest 15mm, to capture the lightning strikes. This photo combines 16 separate exposures as the lightning struck, using image stacking to show multiple bolts in a single frame. The Mediterranean summer storms come in from the north, building over the sea between Malta and Sicily, and they're often intense but brief.

The Parish Church's twin bell towers—completed in 1881—stand resilient against the electrical display, grounded literally and figuratively while nature's voltage rips through the clouds above. Malta's position in the central Mediterranean means it sits at the meeting point of different weather systems, creating dramatic conditions when they collide over these small islands.

This photo captures a side of Malta most visitors never see. It's raw, dramatic, and alive with the energy of a Mediterranean summer storm. The electrical spectacle lighting up the night with thousands of volts becomes the main character here, with Mellieħa's historic architecture grounding the frame in human scale.

When you look at this photograph, I want you to feel that electric intensity—standing in Mellieħa during a rare summer thunderstorm as lightning tears through the Mediterranean sky, where 16 separate bolts illuminate the Parish Church's 1881 towers and centuries of limestone architecture 360 feet above the bay in Malta's dramatic weather.