Construction of the Santa Margherita Lines began in 1638, but works stopped in 1645 and were only resumed in 1715. St. Helen’s Gate was built in 1736 to designs of the French architect Charles François de Mondion. The gate is located at the centre of St. Helen’s Curtain, a stepped curtain wall between St. John Almoner and St. Helen’s Bastions, and it served as the main entrance into the city of Cospicua.
The gate originally had an à la Vauban drawbridge, replaced by a chain-and-tackle mechanism in the early 19th century. The gate also had casemates with two corpi di guardia , which housed the sentries watching the gate.
In 1947, under the direction of Reconstruction Minister Dom Mintoff, the sentry rooms were demolished to make way for two modern openings to enable passage for vehicular traffic.
A triangular lunette and a tenaille originally protected the gate, but these were dismantled in the 19th century to make way for a new road.
St. Helen’s Gate consists of a Baroque portal, regarded as one of the most beautiful 18th-century Hospitaller gateways. The portal’s main façade is built out of alternating plain and rusticated hardstone masonry courses, and it also contains an ornate keystone and two half-columns which support a cornice. A carved marble mortar stands above each column, giving the gate the name Porta dei Mortari. A central pediment is found between the mortars, and it contains two marble escutcheons separated by a carved sword. These originally depicted the coats of arms of the Order of St. John and of Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena, but were defaced during the French occupation of Malta in 1798.
The gate is similar in architecture to the Main Gate of Fort Manoel, designed by Mondion in 1726. It is one of only two gates in Malta that bear representations of life-sized artillery pieces; the other is Porte des Bombes, built in 1721.
TRL carried out the restoration works under the supervision of the Restoration and Preservation Department. They included the restoration and stone replacement of the severely deteriorated built fabric of the gate and bastions.
