Xaghra Parish Live Stream, Gozo, Malta

Seven Masses are said in Xagħra on a Sunday, the first at 6 a.m. and the last at 7 p.m., and the Xaghra Parish live stream carries them from the Basilica of the Nativity of Our Lady, the parish church of this village on Gozo, the second-largest island of Malta. The feed is run by the parish itself and goes out under the name of its radio station, Radju Bambina, so the camera shows the inside of the church during services rather than a fixed outdoor view. It sits with the other Gozo webcams on the site, and most people search for it without the Maltese letter ħ, as Xaghra.

Masses and Radju Bambina on the Xaghra Parish live streaming

On weekdays the basilica holds six Masses, at 5:30, 6:15, 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. and again at 5 and 7 p.m., Malta time. Those are the moments when the Xagħra church live stream is most likely to be on air, and the parish’s published Mass hours are the place to check before you open the player, since funerals, weddings and feast days can change the timetable.

Radju Bambina is also the village’s FM station, on 98.3, with music, news and local programmes alongside parish broadcasts. The video channel behind this player carries the station’s name, so when no service is under way the live feed may be offline until the next Mass.

Inside the Basilica of the Nativity of Our Lady

Most of what the camera shows is marble. The nave and its ten chapels are lined with it, and so are the fourteen Stations of the Cross, blessed in February 1963. The altarpiece is the titular painting of the Nativity of Mary, and the statue of Il-Bambina, the infant Mary carried through the streets every September, was made in Marseille by the firm Gallard et Fils. The paintings on the vault were commissioned from the Italian artist Virginio Monti after 1915. The site’s other church webcams include cathedrals in Paris and Seoul with very different interiors.

The people of Xagħra paid for most of it with their own hands. Work on the present church was halted by the plague of 1814, which killed 104 people in the village, among them the parish priest, Vincenzo Cauchi. The building, still without its dome, was finished on 5 January 1855 at a cost of 70,000 scudi, of which 46,000 was unpaid labour by the villagers, and it was consecrated on 26 May 1878.

The dome followed in 1892. Builders started on 17 May and finished in about six months, and parish records say villagers left a stone, a bucket of water or a sack of soil at the church door every morning on their way to Mass. That year the September feast was moved to 25 October so the new dome could be blessed on the same day. The two bell towers hold six bells, the only church in Gozo with that many, the oldest cast in 1770 and the largest weighing 2,778 kilograms. Pope Paul VI made the church a minor basilica on 26 August 1967.

When is the Xagħra feast? Il-Vitorja on 8 September

Xagħra celebrates the Nativity of Mary on 8 September, the same day Malta marks the end of the Great Siege of 1565, which is why both the church and the square are known as Il-Vitorja, Our Lady of Victories. The feast day begins with Masses before dawn and a Pontifical Mass in the morning, and in the evening the statue of Il-Bambina leaves the basilica for a procession through the village, coming back late at night to a full Victory Square. Since 8 September 2003 the basilica has also been spiritually affiliated with the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

Ġgantija, Ramla and the road from the ferry

The basilica faces Victory Square (Pjazza il-Vitorja), the village’s main square, where a stone monument to St Anthony the Abbot was unveiled in 2001. The choice is not random: when the parish was founded in 1688, its first church was a chapel dedicated to him, and that chapel still stands in Xagħra.

A short walk from the square, at the edge of the Xagħra plateau, the Ġgantija temples date from around 3600 BC and have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980. Heritage Malta runs the Ġgantija Archaeological Park, which you enter through an interpretation centre on Triq John Otto Bayer. North of the village, Calypso’s Cave looks down on the red sand of Ramla Bay.

Most visitors reach Gozo on the ferry to Mġarr, and the Mġarr Harbour live cam watches the terminal on Shore Street, so you can see the boats come in before the drive inland to Xagħra.

The best time to open the Xaghra Parish live stream is Sunday at 11 a.m., the last of the morning Masses, or the evening of 8 September for the feast. When Gozo is asleep, our free live webcams cover places where the day is still going.