Brazil’s Commandante Ferraz Station on Admiralty Bay, opened in 1983–84, is located between an old whaling station and the site of the abandoned British Base G (removed in 1996). Ferraz’s distinctive orange-roofed, pine-green buildings accommodated 66 people, but a fire started by an overflowing fuel tank in 2012 killed two people and gutted the station. In 2017 the Brazilian government began building a new US$100-million base, with a projected completion date of 2018.
Mt Cross lies behind the station, and a small cemetery contains several graves and memorials. Circumnavigate the sensitive bed of lichens nearby, whose boundaries are marked in stone. Also nearby is a composite whale ‘skeleton’ on a moss bed, which contains the bones of no fewer than nine whale species.