Falkland Islands

The islands were uninhabited when Europeans arrived. France, Britain, and Spain all made claims and planted small settlements in the eighteenth century; Spain, and then the newly independent Argentine state, asserted control in the early nineteenth. Britain reasserted its own claim and established a continuous administration in 1833 — a step Argentina has never accepted.

A sheep-farming colony grew up, dominated by the Falkland Islands Company, with a settled population mostly of British descent who became known as "Kelpers". On 2 April 1982 Argentina's military junta invaded. A British naval task force sailed 13,000 kilometres south, and after air, sea, and land fighting — the loss of HMS Sheffield, the battle of Goose Green, the assaults on the hills around Stanley — retook the islands by 14 June. In all, 255 British and 649 Argentine service personnel and three islanders died.

Since the war the United Kingdom has kept a garrison at Mount Pleasant, and the islands have prospered on revenue from selling fishing licences in their waters. A 2013 referendum returned a 99.8 per cent vote to remain a British Overseas Territory on a 92 per cent turnout. Argentina maintains its claim, and the "Malvinas" are written into its constitution.

The Falklands are a small, close-knit, English-speaking, mostly Christian community — rural, practical, and self-reliant, with a strong tradition of volunteering and mutual help. Life divides between Stanley and "camp" (from the Spanish campo), the term for everywhere else — the scattered farms and settlements reached by rough track and small plane.

Land Rovers, the pub, darts, and Boxing Day horse racing are fixtures, and the identity is firmly and deliberately British, bound up with the right of the islanders to determine their own future. The 1982 war is present in daily life: the memorials, the battlefield sites, and Liberation Day on 14 June.

About 3,700 people live in the Falklands, roughly three-quarters of them in Stanley and the rest on isolated farms across the two main islands and the smaller ones. The economy runs on fishing-licence fees — largely for squid — plus wool from around half a million sheep, wildlife and expedition-cruise tourism, and services to the military base.

There is little poverty of the usual kind and the government runs a surplus, but everything is remote, imported, and weather-dependent, and many young people leave for education in the United Kingdom. Offshore oil has been discovered but not developed.

Falklands cooking is British home food adapted to what grazes and grows: mutton and lamb in every form (locals joke about "365"), beef, and vegetables raised in polytunnels against the wind. "Smoko" is the mid-morning tea break. Local touches include diddle-dee jam, made from the berries of the heath shrub that covers the moorland, upland goose, and sea trout. Stanley has fish and chips and a couple of pubs, and a lot of the larder is imported and tinned; small-batch local ale and gin have appeared in recent years.

Wildlife is why most people come. Five penguin species breed here — the king penguins of Volunteer Point, plus gentoo, Magellanic, southern rockhopper, and macaroni — along with black-browed albatross colonies, southern elephant seals, sea lions, and Commerson's dolphins. Much of it is seen on offshore islands run as wildlife lodges, among them Sea Lion Island, Carcass, Saunders, Pebble, and Bleaker.

Stanley itself is a tidy, colourful little capital with Christ Church Cathedral and its arch made from the jawbones of two blue whales, the Historic Dockyard Museum, and the 1982 memorials; Gypsy Cove just outside town has Magellanic penguins, and the Cape Pembroke lighthouse marks the eastern point. For those with an interest in the war, the battlefields and the Argentine cemetery near Darwin can be visited with a guide.

The harbours hold the hulks of nineteenth-century sailing ships driven in for shelter and never repaired, and the open camp — tussock islands, white-sand beaches, and windswept moorland — is the real character of the place.