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Welcome

Stromness Manager’s Villa stands within the abandoned Stromness Whaling Station on the north coast of South Georgia Island. South Georgia Heritage Trust embarked on an ambitious project to protect this important building for decades to come by stabilising the building. With permission from the Government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands under RAP/XXX, we completed building works in 2026, securing the place of this building along the shoreline for many years to come.

South Georgia has no permanent residents and by digitising this incredible piece of South Georgia’s history, we ensure that global visitors, the world over have access, at home, to an incredible piece of South Georgia’s past. Safeguarding South Georgia’s cultural heritage for the years to come.

This website allows you to explore the Manager’s Villa from where you are. Access to the physical building is strictly off-limits due to the asbestos, debris and dilapidated condition of the whaling station it sits in. But we did not want this to hinder visitors experiencing this incredible building. A place you can return to again and again without travelling thousands of miles for the experience.

The station was once part of a busy industrial landscape of factory processing sheds, workshops, stores and workers’ accommodation. The Villa occupied a more prominent and separate position as the station manager’s dwelling, a place of authority and relative comfort beside the chaotic, exposed world of the whaling station.

The villa was both a domestic home within an industrial site and, in May 1916, the place where three members of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition; Shackleton, Worsley and Crean, finally reached after crossing South Georgia. The Manager’s Villa is a tangible link to their desperate story of beginning to rescue their crewmates.