Uphill from the muelle pasajero (passenger pier), opposite the meticulously landscaped Plaza Guillermo Brown, the island’s Oficina de Informes was, until recently, the Servicio Penitenciario’s headquarters. It now houses provincial park rangers. Several antique baterías (gun emplacements) line the south shore.

At the plaza’s upper end stand ruins of the onetime Cuartel (military barracks), which later became jail cells. Clustered together nearby are the Cine-Teatro, the former theater, with its gold-tinted rococo details; the Museo de la Isla (Island Museum); and the former Casa Médicos de Lazareto, the quarantine center that is now the Centro de Interpretación Ecológica (Environmental Interpretation Center).

Opposite the Cuartel, the Panadería Rocío (1913) is a bakery that makes celebrated fruitcakes; farther inland, the now-unused faro (lighthouse, 1881) rises above the trees. To the north, the graves of conscripts who died in an early-20th-century epidemic dot the isolated cementerio (cemetery).

At the island’s northwest end, trees and vines grow among the crumbling structures of the so-called Barrio Chino (Chinatown), marking the Puerto Viejo, the sediment-clogged former port. Across the island, beyond the airstrip, similar vegetation grows in the Zona Intangible, which is closed to the public.