Warm winter destinations from Malta

Malta's winter is mild on paper and disappointing in practice: grey, wet and windy for weeks at a time. This is a guide to where you can actually go from here to find warmth, sorted by how far you have to travel to get it.

Why this page exists

Maltese winters do not get cold in any northern European sense — frost is not a thing here. What they get is wet. The rain arrives from about October and runs through to February, in hard bursts rather than drizzle, and it comes with wind. The gregale off the north-east can shut down the ferries and make the whole island feel like a headland, which it more or less is. Houses are built for heat rather than cold, so a damp winter day indoors is colder than the number suggests. And the sea, beautifully warm well into November, is out of the question by January.

So the winter question in Malta is not "somewhere warmer than home" — it is already fairly mild. It is "somewhere dry and reliably sunny", and that is a different search. Our Malta travel guide covers the flip side: the shoulder months here, which are excellent.

First decide which kind of warmth you want

This is the decision that sorts the whole list, and most people skip it and end up disappointed.

Closest: North Africa

Tunisia

The nearest warm-country option to Malta by a wide margin — it is almost due south. Winter there is mild and much drier than here, but it is not swimming weather on the north coast. The southern half is where it pays off: the oases and desert edge around Tozeur and Douz have brilliant dry sunny days in winter, which is the only sensible time to visit them, though the nights get properly cold. Djerba, off the south-east coast, is the mildest corner. Tunisia also uses its own currency and is structurally inexpensive, which makes it one of the better value winter trips from here.

Morocco

Further west, and a genuinely different winter depending on where you stand. Marrakech gives you warm, bright afternoons and cold nights — pack for both, and expect riads to be chilly after dark. The Atlantic coast around Agadir is the reliably mild-and-sunny stretch, and Essaouira is beautiful and windy year-round. The Atlas mountains hold snow in winter, and the desert south of them is warm by day and near-freezing at night. If your winter goal is walking, food and cities rather than a sunlounger, Morocco is the strongest option in this bracket.

The Atlantic islands

The Canary Islands

Off the coast of north-west Africa and far enough south to sit outside the European winter altogether — the closest thing to guaranteed winter warmth that still counts as Spain. Tenerife splits sharply: the south is dry and reliably sunny, the north greener and cloudier, and Teide in the middle high enough to be cold and occasionally snow-capped while people swim below. Gran Canaria works the same way. Fuerteventura and Lanzarote are flatter, drier and windier — excellent for beaches and watersports, sparse if you want cities. The sea is cooler than the summer Mediterranean but swimmable.

Madeira

Mild rather than hot, and honest about it. Madeira in winter is for walking — the levada paths, the mountain interior, the laurel forest — and for a subtropical greenness the Canaries do not have. It is not a winter beach destination and does not pretend to be. Our Madeira guide goes into where the walking actually is.

Cape Verde

Further out into the Atlantic and further south, which buys you more dependable heat. Sal and Boa Vista are flat, sandy and windy — the wind is a feature if you sail or kite and a nuisance if you do not. Santo Antão is the mountainous, dramatic, hiking end of the archipelago. Everything here is a longer journey than the Canaries and it will involve a connection.

Egypt and the Red Sea

This is the answer for most people who want to swim in January. The Red Sea coast — Hurghada, Marsa Alam, Sharm el-Sheikh, Dahab — is warm and dry through the winter, and crucially the water stays warm enough to snorkel and dive comfortably when the Mediterranean has given up entirely. The reefs are the real draw; Dahab is the low-key, backpacker-ish end of the coast and Marsa Alam the quieter one for diving.

Inland, winter is simply the correct season for Egypt. Luxor and Aswan in summer are brutal; between roughly November and March they are warm, dry and walkable, which is why that is when everybody goes. Cairo is mild and hazy rather than hot. A trip that combines a week on the Red Sea with a few days up the Nile is one of the strongest winter itineraries available from this part of the Mediterranean.

The Gulf

The UAE, Oman and Qatar invert the European calendar: their summer is unbearable and their winter is the good season, with warm dry days from about November to March and sea temperatures that stay comfortable. Dubai and Abu Dhabi give you the built, air-conditioned, everything-works version. Oman is the more interesting trip — Muscat's old town and souq, wadis you can swim in, the Hajar mountains, desert dunes inland — and its mountain interior runs noticeably cooler than the coast, which in winter is a feature rather than a problem. This is a longer journey and will normally mean connecting somewhere.

East Africa and the Indian Ocean

The furthest bracket, and the one that needs the most planning. Zanzibar is the headline: white sand, warm water year-round, and a genuinely interesting island beyond the beach in Stone Town's alleyways and the spice farms inland. The seasons matter more than the temperature — the long rains fall roughly March to May and there is a shorter wet spell around November, while the window from about December to February is hot and mostly dry. That is the one that lines up with a European winter. Our Zanzibar guide has the detail on which coast suits which kind of trip, since the east and west sides of the island behave very differently.

The Kenyan and Tanzanian coasts follow similar patterns, and the mainland safari parks are within reach if you are already making the journey. Nothing in this bracket is a weekend — treat it as a proper trip of ten days or more, or the travel time swallows it.

Getting there from Malta, honestly

Malta's flight schedule thins out in winter. Routes that run several times a week in August may drop to seasonal or disappear, and this changes year to year, so the right approach is to check what is actually flying for your dates rather than to assume last winter's map still holds. Broadly: Tunisia and the near end of North Africa are the shortest hops; the Canaries, Egypt, the Gulf and anything in East Africa will usually involve at least one connection from here, often through a mainland European or Gulf hub.

Two practical consequences. First, a connection adds hours at both ends, so it argues for longer trips — the same logic covered in our budget trips from Malta guide, where trip length is one of the biggest levers on cost. Second, connections are where winter weather disruption bites, so leave real margin on the return if you have to be back at work.

Working out which one fits

The honest answer depends on how long you have, what you can spend and which of the three kinds of warmth you want. That is the calculation the AI trip planner is built for: give it a total budget, your departure airport and roughly when, and it works out which of these are realistic, splitting the budget across flights, accommodation, food, activities and local transport so you can see the shape of the trip. Every figure is an estimate rather than a quote, and it says so. If you would rather browse first, our destinations pages sort by the kind of trip rather than the place name, and quiet beach destinations in Europe covers the closer-to-home option for the shoulder months either side of winter.