Getting to Popeye Village
The film set occupies Anchor Bay, at the northern end of Malta beyond Mellieħa. Arriving is not difficult, but it repays a few minutes of thought the evening before. Here is the bus, the drive, and honest approximations of how long each one takes.
Everything below is about arriving. What the place actually is, who enjoys it and who walks out early is on the full guide, and if you have not read that yet it is the more useful half of the decision.
By bus, and the change at Mellieħa
Route 101 is the service that reaches Anchor Bay, and it works from Mellieħa. That one fact determines the shape of the whole journey: wherever you are staying on the islands, the practical plan is to get yourself to Mellieħa by whatever route serves it, and then change onto the 101 for the last leg down to the bay.
How frequently that service runs is not something we will state. Departures shift with the season, with the day of the week and with whatever the roads are doing, so any schedule set into a web page decays quietly and then strands somebody. Look the departures up yourself on the day, through the national transport service or at the stop, and take that over anything a page published months ago.
The honest warning about going by bus is not the waiting, it is the way delay compounds. Two legs and an interchange behave nothing like a single continuous drive: losing ten minutes at the start can cost far more than ten minutes by the end, and the homeward run does the same thing again when everybody is hot and finished. If something later in the day is booked and cannot move, the bus is a poor way to protect it.
By car
Driving has the fewest moving parts, and it is what we would suggest whenever the visit has to land on one particular morning. A phone or a hire car satnav will produce the route, produce it correctly, and account for today's traffic in a way a paragraph written months ago cannot, so we describe no turns, junctions or signage here. We would only be a worse copy of the device already sitting on the dashboard.
The decision that genuinely belongs to you is the departure time, and it is worth taking seriously. An early arrival pays twice over: the set is easier company before the heat builds, and the swimming that makes this more than a short lap of a wooden village is also better before the middle of the day. Settle the hour, and the driving looks after itself.
Rough journey times
Everything in this section is an approximation, so here is exactly what it is approximate against. These are our own estimates for driving, in ordinary daytime traffic, outside the peak of the summer holidays, checked against the road network as it stood on the date at the foot of this page. They are not a timetable, they are not a promise, and they are not an August Saturday, when every figure here stretches and some of them stretch a lot.
- From Mellieħa: a few minutes. Call it under a quarter of an hour and you will not be caught out. This is the reason so many families staying in the north do the film set and a beach on the same day without it feeling like an outing.
- From Valletta, Sliema or St Julian's: somewhere between about forty-five minutes and a full hour, and the same span for all three. That repetition is deliberate. Measured against a run to the far north, those three bases sit close enough to one another that splitting them into separate numbers would be false precision, and false precision is worse than an honest span.
By bus, add substantially to whichever of those applies to you, and stop treating the result as a plan. It is two legs, a change and a timetable you do not control. If the visit has to happen on a particular morning, drive it or start absurdly early.
And pad whatever number you settle on. Traffic on these islands punishes optimism, and the cost of arriving twenty minutes early with a coffee is nothing next to the cost of arriving an hour late with everybody in a temper.
The walk down into the bay
Sweethaven stands at the bottom of the bay rather than at the top of it, so the arrival is downhill and the departure is uphill. That second half is the one nobody budgets for, because it arrives at the wrong moment: late in the visit, in full sun, with the youngest member of the party already out of enthusiasm.
No step count, gradient or distance appears here. We have sourced none of the three, and supplying them from imagination is precisely the sort of assured little detail that earns a page trust and later loses it all at once. The usable advice is simpler anyway. Keep something back for the return leg, and leave the hour after the visit unbooked.
Parking
How many vehicles the bay takes, and what it asks of you to leave one there, are both figures we do not hold. So neither is printed, and neither is estimated. A visible gap on a page is more use to a reader than a confident invention.
What survives that ignorance is one piece of advice: turn up early. A single attraction and a Maltese summer are between them enough to tell you that arriving late means taking whatever is left rather than whatever is best. Should the car be load-bearing for your whole day, put the question to the operator at popeyemalta.com, who hold the current hours and admission as well.
If the weather turns
The bay carries a good share of the visit, and weather removes the bay before it removes anything else. Take the swimming out and what remains is a circuit of a wooden village, which is a thinner and much quicker proposition, so a bad forecast is a real reason to shift the day instead of gritting your teeth through it.
Two sensible replacements, both in the same corner of the island. The Malta National Aquarium at Qawra is indoors and aimed at the same age group, which makes it the standard wet-weather answer up here. And Mellieħa Bay is worth a walk even on a day nobody is getting in the water, if what you actually need is to be outside for an hour.
If the sea is merely choppy rather than hopeless, the water-based days are the ones to check first: the Blue Lagoon on Comino, the diving at Ċirkewwa and the ferry across to Gozo all start from the north and all depend on conditions, so the operator will tell you before you set off whether the day is on.
Common questions
Which bus goes to Popeye Village?
Route 101. It is the service that reaches Anchor Bay and it works from Mellieħa, so nearly every journey resolves into reaching Mellieħa and interchanging there. How frequently it runs is not something we state, because that shifts with the season. Look the departures up yourself before you set out.
How long does it take to drive from Valletta?
Somewhere between about forty-five minutes and a full hour in ordinary daytime traffic, which is our own estimate rather than a measured figure. Use it to plan with, stretch it in high season, and put nothing time-critical on top of it.
How far is it from Mellieħa?
A few minutes by car, and under a quarter of an hour on any ordinary day. That short hop is why staying in the north turns this into a morning rather than an expedition.
Is there parking at Anchor Bay?
How many vehicles the bay takes, and what it charges, are figures we do not hold, so neither is printed. The advice that holds either way is to turn up early, and to put the question to the operator when the car is load-bearing for your whole day.
Is there a walk down to the village?
Yes. Sweethaven stands at the bottom of the bay, so the arrival is downhill and the departure is uphill. No step count or gradient appears here, but the return leg is the half people neglect to save energy for.
What should we do instead if the weather is bad?
Shift it. The bay carries a good share of the visit, and stripped of the swimming the morning is thin. The aquarium at Qawra is the indoor answer in this corner of the island, and the northern beaches reward a walk even when nobody intends to get wet.
Last checked: 14 September 2026. Every duration given above is our own approximation for driving in ordinary daytime traffic, and none of them is a schedule. You will find no service frequency, no parking charge, no parking capacity, no admission figure and no opening time here. All five are the operators' to publish, and all five move.