Imagine a country with not a single river, no lakes, no oil, no gas, no ore and no forest. A bare limestone rock in the middle of the Mediterranean, where rain falls only half the year. By every law of logic there should be a lighthouse here, or a fishing village - yet almost 600,000 people live here, and this is by far the most densely populated country in Europe. In this video we break down how Malta defeated its own geography. Why islands covering just 316 square kilometres hold more people than Iceland, which is 326 times larger. How limestone turns every rainfall into lost water, and why the central question of Maltese history sounded brutally simple for thousands of years: what do we drink here. We follow the whole road - from the underground cisterns beneath every house and the aqueduct of 1615 to British pumps, the salinization of the aquifers and the reverse osmosis plant of 1983, the largest in the world at the time. Today around 70% of all Maltese water comes straight out of the sea. We also look at why Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, the Knights Hospitaller, Napoleon and the British Empire all fought over this useless stone, how the island survived the Great Siege of 1565 and the blockade of the Second World War, and how it was twice abandoned by people completely. And most importantly - the dark side of the miracle: apartments costing 16 annual salaries, 440,000 cars without a single railway, a third of the population born abroad, and the Maltese language, which has fewer speakers than an average European city has residents.