Attractions & Natural Wonders · Ascension Island
Ascension Island: Seven Attractions and Natural Wonders
A raw volcanic island in the mid-Atlantic, a green garden planted on its one peak, and beaches that fill each year with nesting green turtles
By Worldlore Editorial · 30 September 2026
A cinder heap in the middle of the ocean
Ascension is a small volcanic island roughly halfway between Brazil and Africa, with no indigenous population and no tourism industry to speak of. It has been a British base since 1815 — first a Royal Navy garrison, later a cable station, and today a joint UK–US airfield and communications site. There is no scheduled commercial airline service; visitors need a permit, a reason, and somewhere to stay, and most come on the RAF-run South Atlantic Air Bridge, the monthly link with Saint Helena, or the occasional ship.
For the few who make it, the rewards are unusual: raw volcanic scenery, one of the world's stranger man-made forests, huge seabird colonies, and a green-turtle nesting beach on the doorstep of the only village. The seven entries below are what there is to see. It is warm and dry year-round; turtle season runs roughly November to May.
1. Green Mountain National Park
When Charles Darwin visited on the Beagle in 1836, Ascension's single peak was as bare as the rest of the island. On the advice of Joseph Hooker, encouraged by Darwin, the Royal Navy began shipping in plants from around the world from 1850 and planting them on the summit. Within decades the top of the mountain had a working cloud forest — bamboo, banana, eucalyptus, Norfolk pine — meant to capture more rain. The result is an almost entirely artificial ecosystem.
Today it is a national park, opened in 2005. A road climbs most of the way; from the top, paths lead to the Dew Pond near the summit and around the upper slopes, with views over the whole island.
2. The green turtle beaches
Every year, thousands of green turtles swim more than 1,200 miles from their feeding grounds off Brazil to breed at Ascension, where they themselves hatched. From about November to May the island's sandy bays — Long Beach, right in front of Georgetown, is the easiest — fill at night with females hauling out to dig nests, and later with hatchlings scrambling for the sea.
Viewing is managed to protect the nests: the island's Conservation Department runs guided turtle tours on several evenings a week in season.
3. Boatswain Bird Island
Rats brought ashore by ships, and the cats introduced from 1815, wiped out most of Ascension's seabird colonies on the main island, and the birds retreated to places the cats could not reach — above all this sheer-sided rock off the eastern shore. After a two-year campaign eradicated the feral cats by 2004, seabirds — masked boobies, frigatebirds, tropicbirds, noddies — began recolonising the main island.
Boat trips out to the island can be arranged through the Conservation Office, and the Letterbox peninsula nearby, a good place to watch frigatebirds, is one of the best walks on Ascension.
4. Comfortless Cove
A cluster of small sandy coves on the northwest coast makes the island's main swimming and snorkelling spot, with clear water and reef fish just offshore. The bleak name is real history: in the 19th century this was a fever station where ships with yellow fever aboard were quarantined, and the little "Bonetta Cemetery" is named after HMS Bonetta, which brought its fever victims ashore in 1838.
Comfortless Cove and English Bay are the only beaches recommended for swimming; much of the rest of the coast has dangerous surf and undertow.
5. Georgetown
Georgetown is the island's capital and about as small as a capital gets: a couple of streets of barracks, stores, and workshops on a black lava shore, built by the Royal Navy in the 19th century. The landmarks are St Mary's church, Fort Bedford and its Victorian cannons on Cross Hill above, the old Royal Marines barracks, and the Heritage Museum below Fort Hayes, which tells the island's history.
It has a small supermarket, a post office, a hotel, and the island's pier.
6. The volcanic landscape and lava walks
Away from the green summit, Ascension is a young volcanic island of almost lunar starkness: 44 distinct dormant craters, black and red ash slopes, and rough lava fields; the last eruption may have been as recent as about 500 years ago. Marked trails — collected in the island's "Letterbox" walk network, with stamps to collect at each — lead to craters like the Devil's Riding School and the Broken Tooth, to White Hill, and along the coast.
The island's mid-ocean position is why the European Space Agency has a rocket tracking station here, and why NASA ran a tracking station from 1967 to 1990.
7. The Wideawake sooty tern colony
The airfield takes its name from the sooty terns — locally "wideawake birds," for their ceaseless calling — that nest in vast numbers on the open lava "fairs" near the airfield. When the colony is breeding, the birds lay and raise their chicks on the bare cinder, then disperse back out to sea.
When the birds are in, the noise and the wheeling clouds of them are extraordinary. The colony sits on the Wideawake Fairs at Mars Bay, and the Conservation Office can advise on when and where to view it without disturbance.
Ascension is genuinely hard to visit and has almost no infrastructure for tourists, but for anyone who can arrange it, it is one of the last places in the Atlantic that still feels like the edge of the map.