Stanley, Falkland Islands
Peering over a sturdy hedge - the winds here are merciless and would topple an army of garden gnomes – who could doubt that English culture had taken root in this south Atlantic archipelago? For us, still just starting out on an epic voyage along the Atlantic Ridge, this was our first visit to what one recent travel writer has dubbed the “Last Pink Bits”, tiny remnants of the British Empire still scattered around the globe. Charles Darwin rightly described the landscape here as barren and desolate: colder, windier and wetter than Wales, where his family had their summer home. Contemplating the principal settlement of Stanley from the summit of Mount Tumbledown, the object of an optional afternoon hike and a place still littered with the debris of war, it was hard to credit that some thousand lives had been lost just a quarter of a century ago to defend the “kelpers” - as the local population are known – from submission to an Argentine administration.
The 1982 Falklands Conflict was about sovereignty. The British claimed sovereignty of the islands as the power that had established the most recent continuous settlement on the island. To the Argentines, the “kelpers” were but planted colonials occupying an adjacent territory originally claimed by Spain, a claim they had inherited. They called the islands Las Malvinas, a Spanish cooption of the French Les Malouines: for it was Breton fishermen from St Malo who had first named the archipelago - another way of defining sovereignty, perhaps?
Today, the locals distinguish BC residents and the newcomers, BC standing for Before the Conflict. Wars have a remarkable capacity to accelerate change. Where there had been so little expenditure of public money BC, following the war Stanley finds itself equipped with a state-of-the-art school and hospital, a swimming pool and brasserie, decent roads and a deepwater harbor, very convenient for visiting cruise ships like our own National Geographic Endeavour. For the Falklands has become a tourist destination – in spite of twenty to thirty thousand landmines still hidden in 117 locations around the islands. And battlefield tours now compete with wildlife for the attention of the inquisitive visitor.
Peering over a sturdy hedge - the winds here are merciless and would topple an army of garden gnomes – who could doubt that English culture had taken root in this south Atlantic archipelago? For us, still just starting out on an epic voyage along the Atlantic Ridge, this was our first visit to what one recent travel writer has dubbed the “Last Pink Bits”, tiny remnants of the British Empire still scattered around the globe. Charles Darwin rightly described the landscape here as barren and desolate: colder, windier and wetter than Wales, where his family had their summer home. Contemplating the principal settlement of Stanley from the summit of Mount Tumbledown, the object of an optional afternoon hike and a place still littered with the debris of war, it was hard to credit that some thousand lives had been lost just a quarter of a century ago to defend the “kelpers” - as the local population are known – from submission to an Argentine administration.
The 1982 Falklands Conflict was about sovereignty. The British claimed sovereignty of the islands as the power that had established the most recent continuous settlement on the island. To the Argentines, the “kelpers” were but planted colonials occupying an adjacent territory originally claimed by Spain, a claim they had inherited. They called the islands Las Malvinas, a Spanish cooption of the French Les Malouines: for it was Breton fishermen from St Malo who had first named the archipelago - another way of defining sovereignty, perhaps?
Today, the locals distinguish BC residents and the newcomers, BC standing for Before the Conflict. Wars have a remarkable capacity to accelerate change. Where there had been so little expenditure of public money BC, following the war Stanley finds itself equipped with a state-of-the-art school and hospital, a swimming pool and brasserie, decent roads and a deepwater harbor, very convenient for visiting cruise ships like our own National Geographic Endeavour. For the Falklands has become a tourist destination – in spite of twenty to thirty thousand landmines still hidden in 117 locations around the islands. And battlefield tours now compete with wildlife for the attention of the inquisitive visitor.
