It’s Island Week 3 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. It’ll probably last about a week.

The island of Tristan da Cunha and its surrounding archipelago are located in the southern Atlantic ocean, 2816 km from the nearest continent, making it the most remote island in the world!

Tristan da Cunha is a dependency of the British overseas territory Saint Helena, and also a live volcanic island. The main settlement, “Edinburgh of the Seven Seas“¹, had to be temporarily abandoned in 1961 due the volcano erupting.

As Edinburgh of the Seven Seas is 2,400 km from the main settlement on Saint Helena, it chalks up an additional record of the “most remote permanent settlement in the world”.

The other islands in the archipelago include Gough Island, which has a temporary population of 6 South Africans who work at the small weather station…

… and the mysterious sounding Inaccessible Island. Officially uninhabited (presumably for obvious reasons), Inaccessible Island also appears to be inaccessible to high-resolution photography satellites (unlike the rest of the archipelago).

More info on Tristan da Cunha, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas and Saint Helena can be found at Wikipedia.

Thanks to Nico, Tom and Matt.

We feel sure that the undoubtedly great, and now very sadly late Steve Irwin wouldn’t blame the stingray that brought about his untimely demise for a single second. In fact we reckon that Steve probably wouldn’t want these normally very passive creatures getting a bad reputation, as he was one of only a handful of people who have ever been recorded as being killed by one.

So in Steve’s honour, we’d like to welcome you to the Cayman Islands very own Stingray City, a series of shallow sand bars where stingrays are found in abundance and visitors can feed, pet, and swim with these incredible creatures. Around each of those boats, you can clearly see the dark shapes of their bodies as the rays congregate to be fed by tourists.

This post is dedicated to Steve, his wife Terri, and their young family.

More on Steve Irwin, Stingray City, the Cayman Islands and of course Stingrays, at Wikipedia.

Welcome to the loose collection of islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean known as South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.

Currently an overseas territory of the United Kingdom, the glacier covered main island of South Georgia was invaded by Argentinean forces on 19 March 1982 – triggering the start of the Falklands War.

South Georgia is also the final resting place of British explorer Ernest Shackleton, who is buried somewhere just south of the settlement of Grytviken, which is looking a little run-down since whaling ended here in 1966 – you can still see the rusting remains of whale oil processing plants and abandoned whaling ships.

Most of the rest of the island group is uncovered by high-resolution, with the stunning exception of the Candlemas Islands, a pair of uninhabited volcanic islands surrounded by hundreds of awesome icebergs.

Long list of further reading: South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Grytviken, Falklands war, the Candlemas Islands, and finally the official site of South Georgia!

Gibraltar is an overseas territory of the United Kingdom on the southern tip of Spain. I visited Gibraltar while on a Spanish holiday a few years back and, just like the rest of the UK, it rained a lot.

We’ll start today’s tour (hopefully rain free) with the famous Gibraltar rock and the monkeys that live there. The Barbary Apes live in a cave near the Charles V Wall and tourists can walk up the rock to see the monkeys. Most of the paths up the rock are off-limits to the public but from the satellite viewpoint we can see on top of the rock there are various look out points with gun batteries.

A fair amount of Gibraltar is built on reclaimed land and the lack of space is apparent when you look at Gibraltar’s only airstrip. Stretching the full width of the land (and plus some) it even intersects a road. At either side you can see a few cars waiting for the runway to be clear. Lastly on our little tour we visit the the most southerly point of Gibraltar where you can see Europa Point Lighthouse.

Thanks: Carson Diltz, Caius Toneriko, Keith T., damian, Rob, Jan Brasna, David de Hora, Teseo, Daniel