South Georgia (Grytviken and St Andrews Bay)

South Georgia, a British overseas territory in the South Atlantic, holds at St Andrews Bay the largest king penguin colony in the world, with more than 150,000 breeding pairs, whose massed ranks across the beach make one of the most cited wildlife spectacles anywhere on the planet. The settlement of Grytviken, founded in 1904 by the Norwegian captain Carl Anton Larsen as the island's first permanent whaling station, ran until 1965 and processed more than 175,000 whales over its six decades, until the collapse of the whale populations made the business unviable; today its rusting structures stand alongside the cemetery where the explorer Ernest Shackleton is buried, having died on the island in 1922 during his fourth Antarctic expedition, and alongside an ambitious invasive rodent eradication programme completed in 2018 that has allowed native birds to return to nest on the main island for the first time in two centuries.