Qualla: Christ Church Cathedral

Christ Church Cathedral: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Liam Quinn from Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. Most cathedrals are remembered for their spires. This one is remembered for its bones. On the grass in front of Christ Church Cathedral in Stanley stands an arch made from the jaws of two blue whales - the largest animals ever to live - rising pale against the red-roofed church behind it. The whalebone arch has become the postcard image of the Falklands, the thing every visitor photographs first. But the modest building it frames carries its own quiet distinction: at nearly 52 degrees south, this is the southernmost Anglican cathedral on Earth, a parish that stretches from these wind-scoured islands all the way to the edge of Antarctica.

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Image: Liam Quinn from Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Christ Church Cathedral: Built on a Landslide

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Liam Quinn from Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. The cathedral exists because its predecessor did not survive. In 1886 a peat slip - a slow, suffocating slide of waterlogged ground - tore through part of Stanley and destroyed Holy Trinity Church, which had stood on this spot. The Falklanders rebuilt, and on 21 February 1892 Bis...

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Image: Liam Quinn from Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Christ Church Cathedral: The Arch of Two Whales

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Liam Quinn from Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. The whalebone arch went up in 1933 to mark a hundred years of British rule in the Falklands. Its four great jawbones came from two blue whales, hauled south from the whaling stations of the sub-Antarctic and set on end to form a gateway taller than the people who pass beneath it....

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Image: Liam Quinn from Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Christ Church Cathedral: A Church That Remembers

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alex Petrenko, CC BY-SA 3.0. Step inside and the cathedral turns into a chronicle of the South Atlantic. On the south wall hangs a White Ensign flown by HMS Achilles at the Battle of the River Plate in December 1939, when Royal Navy cruisers cornered the German raider Graf Spee off the coast of Uruguay. The ...

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Image: Alex Petrenko | CC BY-SA 3.0