Celebrated annually on this day with a regatta in the Grand Harbour of Valletta, Freedom Day marks the anniversary of the 1979 withdrawal of the Royal Navy from Malta. With the departure of British troops, the island nation for the first time in over a millennia was not host to a foreign military, acclaiming its de facto as well as its de jure independence, having become an independent Commonwealth realm in 1964 and a republic a decade later.