Ascension Island

Ascension was an uninhabited, waterless rock when the Portuguese sighted it in 1501 on Ascension Day. For three centuries ships used it only for turtles and the odd marooned sailor. The Royal Navy garrisoned it in 1815 to help guard Napoleon on Saint Helena and stayed, running the island as a stone frigate, HMS Ascension, until 1922. Charles Darwin called in 1836, and the botanist Joseph Hooker later devised a scheme to "green" the barren summit by planting hundreds of species from around the world, creating the unique man-made cloud forest of Green Mountain.

A Cable & Wireless relay station opened in 1899. In 1942 the United States built Wideawake airfield, which was used again as a staging post for the 1982 Falklands War and remains active. The BBC World Service ran an Atlantic relay station here from 1966 until 2025, and a European Space Agency Ariane tracking station and a signals-intelligence site were added. The island is administered from Saint Helena. There is no permanent population and no right of abode — everyone is present on a contract for the airfield, the American facilities, the government, or the communications operators.

About 800 people live on Ascension, most of them Saint Helenians on work contracts, alongside British and American service and civilian staff. English is the only language. Life revolves around the employers, the two small settlements of Georgetown and Two Boats, the social club, fishing, and the beach. There is no indigenous culture, and nobody is "from" Ascension.

A strong conservation ethos has grown up around the turtles and seabirds, and the turtle-nesting season and the club's sports-and-social calendar shape the year. Contracts end and families move on, so the community turns over steadily.

The population rises and falls with the contracts. Georgetown, the tiny capital, sits by the pierhead; Two Boats village lies halfway up Green Mountain. The economy is entirely the bases and government services, plus income from fishing licences in Ascension's waters. Housing, power, and water are provided by the employers. There is a school, a hospital, a shop, and little else, and the American and RAF airfields dominate the flat lava plain. Broadband is limited and costly.

Food is whatever comes in on the ship or the plane. There is a shop, a couple of small eateries, and the club bars. Fresh fish is the local bounty — the yellowfin tuna and wahoo fishing off Ascension is exceptional — and Saint Helenian home cooking (plo, fishcakes, curry) is common in that community. Otherwise the diet is largely self-catered from imported and frozen goods.

Green Mountain National Park is the surprise: an artificially created cloud forest with a farm, bamboo tunnels, a dew pond near the 859-metre summit, and the walk around "Elliot's Pass". The green turtles that nest on Long Beach and other sands from December to May — one of the largest colonies in the Atlantic — are watched on guided night walks.

Boatswain Bird Island offshore holds a vast seabird colony, and since feral cats were eradicated from the mainland the endemic Ascension frigatebird and the boobies have returned to breed on the main island. The Letterbox peninsula and the lava fields, Comfortless Cove and English Bay for a swim, Cross Hill and the old Marine barracks above Georgetown, and the world-class shore and boat fishing round out a short but distinctive list. The wartime and space-tracking installations are visible landmarks, though the sites themselves are closed.