Falkland Islands

An archipelago of 778 islands in the South Atlantic, 500 km east of Patagonia, with about 3,660 residents and something like half a million sheep. It is a British Overseas Territory, it is claimed by Argentina, and two countries fought a war over it in 1982. It is also one of the best places on Earth to stand very close to an enormous number of wild animals that have no particular interest in you.

The wildlife is the reason to come and it is world-class. Five species of penguin breed here — king, gentoo, Magellanic, southern rockhopper and a handful of macaroni. The islands hold roughly two-thirds of the world's black-browed albatrosses, and Steeple Jason has the largest colony of them anywhere. There are elephant seals, sea lions, fur seals, Commerson's and Peale's dolphins, and orca that hunt seal pups in the shallows at Sea Lion Island. Almost none of it is afraid of people, and there are no land predators to have taught it otherwise.

The human side is stranger and, in its way, just as interesting. Outside Stanley there is "camp" — from the Spanish campo — a landscape of peat, tussac and sheep where settlements are single farms, the light aircraft schedule is announced on the radio the night before, and everybody knows everybody. It is the closest thing left to a nineteenth-century sheep-farming frontier that also has fibre broadband.

And there is 1982. The war lasted 74 days, killed 649 Argentine and 255 British service personnel and three Falkland Islanders, and it is still the organising fact of the islands' politics. Battlefields, memorials and a very direct local view of the sovereignty question are all part of a visit. This page treats that honestly rather than tiptoeing around it — it is impossible to understand the place otherwise.

This is the one thing to understand before you arrive. The islands are administered by the United Kingdom as a self-governing Overseas Territory and are claimed by Argentina as the Islas Malvinas. Both positions have long histories, and the people who live there have a clear and consistently expressed view of their own.

Two large islands — East Falkland and West Falkland — separated by Falkland Sound, plus 776 smaller ones, totalling 12,173 km², roughly the size of Northern Ireland or a sixth of the Czech Republic. There are no trees. The wind is the defining feature of the landscape and of daily life.

Stanley is on the east coast of East Falkland; Mount Pleasant airport is 55 km south-west of it and is where all international flights land. Everything else is reached by 4x4 across camp, by the small FIGAS aircraft, or by boat.

There is no evidence of any indigenous population. The islands were probably first sighted in the sixteenth century — the credit is disputed between Dutch, English and Spanish navigators — and John Strong made the first recorded landing in 1690, naming the sound between the two main islands after Viscount Falkland.

The first settlement was French: Port Louis, founded by Bougainville in 1764, which gave the islands the name Malouines and then Malvinas. Britain founded Port Egmont on Saunders Island in 1765, apparently unaware of the French. Spain bought out the French claim in 1767, expelled the British in 1770, and a near-war was settled diplomatically; Britain returned briefly and withdrew in 1774, leaving a plaque asserting its claim.

After Spanish America's independence, the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata asserted a claim and appointed Luis Vernet as governor in 1829. His seizure of American sealing vessels brought the USS Lexington, which sacked the settlement in 1831. In January 1833 Britain returned and required the small Argentine garrison to leave. That date is the pivot of the entire dispute: Britain calls it a reassertion of a prior claim, Argentina calls it an expulsion.

What followed was sheep. The Falkland Islands Company was chartered in 1851, and by the 1870s wool was the economy — great single-family stations across camp, a life of shepherding, peat cutting and radio. Stanley served the sailing ships rounding Cape Horn, and the hulks in its harbour are the wrecks of that trade. The Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914 saw a British squadron destroy von Spee's German cruisers offshore.

On 2 April 1982 Argentine forces invaded, and the ruling military junta — economically failing and politically desperate — presented it as the recovery of the Malvinas. Britain assembled a naval task force and sailed 12,000 km. The war lasted 74 days and ended with the Argentine surrender at Stanley on 14 June.

The capital, and home to about 2,500 of the territory's 3,660 people — which makes it comfortably the smallest capital in the world by some measures and one of the most immediately likeable. Brightly painted metal roofs, Land Rovers, a cathedral with an arch made of whale jaws, and a harbour full of nineteenth-century shipwrecks.

The single best wildlife experience in the Falklands and one of the best in the world: a colony of well over a thousand breeding pairs of king penguins on a white sand beach, with gentoos and Magellanics alongside, and a rope line you stand behind that the penguins routinely ignore by walking straight past you.

The Falklands hold around a million breeding penguins across five species, and roughly two-thirds of the world population of black-browed albatross. For a birder this is one of the highest-value archipelagos on the planet, and almost all of it is approachable on foot.

The marine mammals are as good as the birds, and at one site in particular the interaction between them is the reason people come back.

The islands are where the Falklands trip actually happens. Most are working sheep farms of one or two families with a small lodge attached, reached by FIGAS Islander onto a grass strip, and you stay two or three nights on each.

Camp — from the Spanish campo, a survival of the gaucho era — is everything outside Stanley. Around a thousand people live in it, on sheep stations that can run to tens of thousands of hectares, and it is a way of life that has almost vanished elsewhere.

Around 3,660 people, plus roughly 1,200 military and contractors at Mount Pleasant who live largely separately. The resident population is descended mainly from nineteenth-century British and especially Scottish settlers, with a substantial and growing Chilean and Saint Helenian community.

English, in a variety with a distinct accent — closest to a rural Southern English or New Zealand sound to most ears — and a working vocabulary shaped by sheep, weather and a nineteenth-century gaucho inheritance.

Mutton, fish, seabird eggs when the season and the law allow, and a great deal of baking. It is British home cooking adapted to a place where everything not raised locally arrives by ship every few weeks, and where the freezer is a strategic asset.

What to eat

Tea by the gallon, imported beer, and a small but genuine local drinks industry. Everything alcoholic other than the local products arrives by ship, which shapes both the range and the price.

The Falklands have two conservation stories running at once: a serious, well-funded effort to restore what two centuries of sheep and introduced predators damaged, and a landmine legacy that was cleared entirely and against most expectations.

The Falklands are financially self-sufficient, which surprises people. The territory pays for everything except its own defence, and it does so mainly by selling fishing licences.

Cool, windy and far less extreme than the latitude suggests. The Falklands sit at 51–52° South — the mirror of London — and the ocean keeps temperatures within a narrow band: roughly 2 °C in July and 9 °C in January as monthly means, with summer highs around 15–20 °C. What defines the climate is not cold but wind.

Timing matters more here than in most destinations, because almost everything you have come to see is on a breeding schedule. The broad rule: November to January is the peak for most species, and each month has its own speciality.

This is the hard part, and it shapes everything about a Falklands trip. There are essentially two air routes, both infrequent, and no regular passenger shipping. Getting to the Falklands is genuinely more difficult than getting to most of Antarctica's gateway towns.

There is no short version. From Prague you are looking at 30 to 40 hours of travel and at least two nights in transit, because the only civilian flight leaves Santiago once a week.

Easy in the ways that matter — English-speaking, safe, orderly, and with better internet than you expect — and demanding in logistics. Everything has to be booked before you arrive, and "we'll sort it there" does not work in a territory of 3,660 people.

Expensive, and there is no budget version. A remote territory of 3,660 people with everything shipped in and one flight a week does not produce cheap travel, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

One of the safest places you can travel. Crime is close to non-existent, there is no political violence, and the islands are landmine-free. The risks here are weather, terrain, driving and distance from a hospital — in that order.

The battlefields are close to Stanley, well documented and visited respectfully by people from both countries. A good local guide, several of whom lived through the occupation, turns a set of hillsides into something you will think about for a long time afterwards.

A Falklands trip is built around the weekly flight and the FIGAS schedule, so it comes in units of roughly a week. Here is what actually fits.

The Falklands take wildlife protocol seriously, and with a resident population of 3,660 and colonies that see thousands of visitors a season, the rules are the reason it still works.

For 3,660 people the calendar is remarkably full, and the events are the real thing rather than anything staged for visitors — which is exactly why they are worth attending.

One of the most rewarding wildlife destinations anywhere for a photographer, with the twin problems of extraordinary access and appalling weather in equal measure.

Administered from Stanley as a separate territory, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands lies 1,400 km east-south-east and has no permanent population beyond a handful of government and museum staff. If you can reach it, it is one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on the planet.

The Falklands are one of the hardest places in this book to reach and one of the easiest to love once you do. It is a week of travel and a serious amount of money to visit an archipelago the size of Northern Ireland with a population smaller than a Prague apartment block. And then you sit down on a beach at Volunteer Point and a king penguin walks up to within a metre of you, looks at you with what is unmistakably curiosity, and carries on past, and the arithmetic stops mattering.

The thing nobody tells you is how good the human side is. Everyone in camp will feed you cake, everyone in Stanley will talk to you, and the whole territory operates at a scale where a stranger is still an event. Stay in camp rather than only in Stanley — two nights on Sea Lion or at The Neck on Saunders is what the trip is for, and the lodges are family farms where you eat with the people who run them.

On 1982: go to the battlefields, and go to the Argentine cemetery at Darwin. The islanders' view of the war is direct and unsentimental and they will tell you about it if you ask. So is the fact that 649 Argentine servicemen died here, most of them conscripts younger than the war they were sent to, and that their families still come. Holding both of those in your head at once is the honest way to visit this place, and the islanders manage it better than most outsiders do.

Go in November or December, book a year out, take a windproof jacket you actually trust, and give it ten days rather than seven. And if there is any chance at all of adding South Georgia, take it.

— Radim Kaufmann