Floriana, Midnight, Enrique Iglesias

The church behind the stage was lit from below, white against the dark, and somewhere in the crowd of sweating teenagers and roaring tourists I was moshing to Enrique Iglesias at midnight. Malta in late June. You don’t plan an evening like that—it just happens.

I flew over with a friend for the Isle of MTV festival in Floriana, the kind of thing you tell yourself you’re attending for the music and end up staying for the spectacle. The 2014 lineup was a particular kind of maximalism: Hardwell doing enormous drops for a crowd who’d apparently driven scooters from the other side of the island, Kiesza performing Hideaway like she’d been born for outdoor stages, Dizzee Rascal tearing through his back catalogue with zero concern for pacing or comfort. Nicole Scherzinger appeared and did what Nicole Scherzinger does, which is to say she was impossibly polished in a way that felt almost clinical.

And then Enrique came on. Yes, still alive, yes, still touring. When the opening notes hit, something collectively broke in that square. We ended up moshing next to Vivianna and Lily, two British beauty bloggers who seemed just as surprised as we were to find ourselves in a pit. The heat, the church, the crowd, the man who once sang Hero—somehow it all made perfect sense.

Malta itself I’d barely registered as a destination before the trip, which feels like a genuine oversight. We didn’t have much time beyond the hotel and the festival, but even the short walk from the taxi told me something—old honey-colored stone, the smell of salt, lanes barely wide enough for two people to pass. The beach was quiet and the water was the color travel magazines fake in post-processing. I’d like to go back properly, with time and no agenda. Whether Enrique will be there again is a question I’ll leave open.