Ta' Kola windmill

One of the best preserved windmills in Gozo

Ta Kola Windmill is located in Xaghra Gozo, and its origins go back to 1725, during the times when Malta was ruled by The Knights of St. John, exactly by Grand Master Manoel de Vilhena. Throughout the centuries, the windmill was used by different families but in the 1980s it came into the ownership of the Grech family, who continued to run the windmill up until the 1980s. The construction of this windmill follows a plan which makes it similar to most windmills of that period found in Malta, consisting of a number of rooms on two floors surrounding the central cylindrical tower.

Upon entering in Kola Windmill, you’ll find a workshop on the first room on the right. Keeping the windmill in a good working condition required several skills like carpentry, smithing and stone dressing. The milling mechanism was subjected to a lot of wear and tear, while the windmill’s antennas were often by bad weather. During the times when the will wasn’t working due to unfavourable weather conditions, workmen used to spend time sharpening their tools, repairing carts and wine barrels and horseshoeing.

The next two rooms served as stores for different types of grains, scales and other processes in bread making, so here you can see a lot of hand operated mills that were used to grind small quantities of wheat and sieves that were used to separate the chaff from the flour. 

The rooms upstairs were used as the living quarters for the miller’s family. The first room has the dining room accompanied by typical vernacular loose furniture. Next you can find the kitchen and the bedrooms that include a display of a cotton gin that was used to separate the seed from the cotton and a weaving loom. The spiral staircase leads up to the upper part of the tower housing the milling device. When in operation, the sails must be facing the direction of the wind, and the main shaft and lightweight conical roof had to be turned around accordingly. The external milling mechanism consisting of the six antennae radiating from a central shaft are currently under reconstruction. Ta Kola Windmill was restored and was inaugurated as a folklore museum open to the public in 1992.