The whaling station is Grytviken's bluntest sight: tanks, boilers, workshops, flensing remains, and old boats left to weather in the cold salt air. It is ugly and fascinating at the same time, and it makes the scale of 20th-century Southern Ocean whaling hard to ignore.
Visitors must keep to the permitted route because derelict structures are unsafe. Even from outside the fences, the station is powerful: a whole industrial town reduced to rust beside one of the world's great wildlife islands.