Zavodovski Island is located in the Atlantic ocean and is just 5 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered during the first Russian Antarctic expedition headed by a Russian admiral and explorer Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen. It happened in 1820, but the island was opened for tourist visits only in 1982 and very quickly became one of the main landmarks of the South Sandwich Islands. 

The island has an area of about 25 square kilometers, on which there is almost no vegetation, but every year hundreds of tourists arrive at its shores by huge cruise ship liners. What attracts the bold travelers to these uninhabited lands, to the tiny island in the cold ocean between the island of South Georgia and the Antarctic? Even though, popular guidebooks don’t say a lot about this place, there are two fantastic landmarks, in the sake of which many of the experienced travelers are ready to cross the ocean and have never complained about the harsh climate. 

There is a dangerous Mount Curry stratovolcano of more than 550 meters high. It erupts from time to time and covers most of the island with deathly boiling lava. Its constantly smoldering crater is what attracts fans of extreme tourism, artists and photographers to the island from across the globe. The last eruption of this powerful unpredictable volcano happened in 2016 and covered about half of the territory of the island with a layer of ash. The eruption put at risk the second landmark of the island, dear to all the tourists,  the biggest population of Antarctic penguins. The friendly creatures, of more than half a meter tall, have literally overflowed the island. They build numerous nests here and incubate their chicks that you can see among the adults all year round. Besides, the local penguins can be found on small icebergs drifting in the nearshore waters. Even though, their number amounts to millions today, more than half of the colony of these amazing birds may disappear because of the fast melting of glaciers.