In 2006 the stand-alone MAGIC-I telescope discovered very high energy gamma-ray emission from 3C279. Additional observations were triggered when the source entered an exceptionally bright optical state in January 2007 and the Fermi space telescope measured a bright GeV gamma-ray flare in December 2008 until April 2009. While the complete January 2007 dataset does not show a significant signal, a short flare (of one day duration) has been detected on January 16th with a significance of 5.4 sigma (trial-corrected). The flux corresponds to F(> 150 GeV) = (3.8 pm 0.8)cdot 10-11 ph cm-2 s-1. The December 2008 - April 2009 observations did not detect the source. We collected quasi-simultaneous data at optical and X-ray frequencies and for 2009 also gamma-ray data from Fermi, which we use to determine the spectral energy distributions and the light curves. The hard gamma-ray spectrum is a challenge for standard one-zone models, which are based on relativistic electrons in a jet scattering broad line region photons. We study additionally a two zone model and a lepto-hadronic model, which fit the observed spectral energy distribution more satisfactorily.