Gold Harbour

Gold Harbour is a small bay enclosed by the foothills of the Salvesen Mountains and is one of the loveliest landing sites in all of South Georgia. The extraordinary Bertrab Glacier hanging from its sheer cliffs and backed by the massed ranks of snowy peaks is an unforgettable sight.

Those able to visit on a dawn landing might surmise that the harbour takes its name from the glacier's golden appearance in the soft morning light. It's a poetic notion, but the truth is more prosaic: the German Antarctic Expedition found iron pyrites ('fool's gold') in the rocks here in 1911. A geological survey was carried out the following year in the hope of finding minerals to exploit.

While Bertrab Glacier awes visitors with its beauty, it also tells of South Georgia's fragility in the face of climate change. As late as the 1986 the snout of the glacier reached the sea. Its dramatic retreat to the cliffs has left an outwash plain with a series of lagoons around which the current king penguin residents congregate.

Gold Harbour has an abundance of wildlife. Its noisiest residents are the 26,000 pairs of king penguins and their chicks, who form a noisy mass on the grassy plain stretching from the beach up to the hills.

The beach itself is thick with elephant seals and their pups throughout the season. Fur seals haul out at Gold Harbour but don't typically mate here in such numbers as elsewhere, although as South Georgia's fur seal population continues to grow this may change.

A few hundred pairs of Gentoo penguins nest in the tussac grass here, along with brown skuas, white-chinned petrels and (on the steeper slopes) light-mantled albatross. More exposed rocky area are haunts for blue-eyed shags and kelp gulls. Antarctic terns and South Georgia pintails also breed here.