Category: Falkland Islands

Categories

Dark Tourism & Beaches

This is the winning theme of the poll at the bottom of the previous Blog post: beaches (won with a two-thirds majority!). Now, as I remarked below the poll, beach holidays are of course more or less the opposite of dark tourism, and I for one despise them. I was dragged along to beaches as a child and I put up with it, but as soon as I was old enough to choose my own travel destinations, beaches have never been much on my radar. That is: holiday beaches, beach resorts, that sort of thing. The reason: beaches packed with people are an absolute horror for me. For example, to

1st Anniversary, best of

It was exactly on this day, precisely one year ago, on 28 May 2020, that this blog went live and the first post went up. To mark this first anniversary, I went through the entire blog and picked twelve of my favourite photos used on the blog so far, one for each of the twelve months I’ve been here, as it were.
Here are my 12 choices … in no particular order:

Falklands War

On this Day, 39 years ago, on 2 April 1982, Argentina launched its invasion of the Falkland Islands, a small British overseas territory in the South Atlantic that the Argentinians refer to as the Islas Malvinas and have long claimed should be theirs. In 1982 they tried to take it by force.

Amongst the first targets of the landed troops was Government House in the Islands’ capital Stanley, which you see in the photo above (I took this in

DT & New Year’s Eves

As a kind of follow-on from last Thursday’s post about dark tourism & Christmas, I now give you another photo essay composed of photos from my archives that were all taken on a New Year’s Eve, mostly when travelling abroad. Of course, the New Year’s Eves themselves were not the dark elements here, but took place in countries with a dark reputation and/or where we had undertaken dark-tourism fieldwork during the day.

I’ll do it in reverse chronological order and begin with last year’s New Year’s Eve – when

38 Years since the End of the Falklands War

On this Day: 38 years ago, on 14/15 June (read on!) in 1982, the Falklands War ended with the surrender of Argentina.

The photo above shows an abandoned Argentine position near Wireless Ridge, north-east of Mt Longdon, not far from the islands’ capital Stanley. This position is comparatively well preserved. My guide even pulled out some hidden personal items left behind by the soldiers.

After showing me this