Popeye Village
— — a film set the sea forgot to take back.
Not only on a wall.
“Built in 1979 as Sweethaven for Robert Altman's Popeye, the crooked timber village above Anchor Bay was meant to be struck and never was. Twenty Maltese carpenters raised it in seven months from imported logs. The houses still lean into the wind off Mellieħa, and the swimming coves below the village hold the afternoon light the same way the limestone north of here always has.
Popeye Village, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Popeye Village sits on Anchor Bay, a small inlet on the northwest coast of Malta about three kilometres west of Mellieħa town. The cluster of wooden buildings was raised in seven months from late 1979 by a team of about 165 carpenters and labourers using roughly 2,000 logs and 8,000 wooden planks shipped from the Netherlands and Canada. It was built as Sweethaven, the home village of Popeye, for the Robert Altman musical of the same name. Filming wrapped in 1980; the set was left standing on the bay's quarried limestone shelf and has since been kept up as an open-air attraction.
Anchor Bay was a working quarry before Altman's crew arrived. The pale globigerina limestone shelf at the back of the inlet was cut for building stone, leaving the natural amphitheatre into which the village was fitted. The Maltese stone — soft when first cut, hardening on contact with air — is the same material that built the bastions at Valletta, twenty kilometres south. The timber village above it reads, against that stone, like a stage flat braced into a wall. The contrast is the whole picture: warm Maltese rock below, sun-bleached northern lumber above.
The village is open daily, with seasonal hours that run roughly 09:30 to sunset; admission was around €19 for adults in 2025, with cheaper winter rates and a discount for children under twelve. The site is reached by car or by Malta Public Transport bus 101 from Mellieħa. Inside, the houses hold small museum rooms, an animation studio, and a handful of swimming platforms cut into the cove. The two saltwater pools below the village are open in summer; the boat-trip around the bay runs every twenty minutes when the sea is calm.