Context :

Aims : We present the final public data release of the VLT/ISAAC near-infrared imaging survey in the GOODS-South field .
The survey covers an area of 172.5 , 159.6 and 173.1 arcmin ^ { 2 } in the J , H , and K _ { \mathrm { s } } bands , respectively .
For point sources total limiting magnitudes of J = 25.0 , H = 24.5 , and K _ { \mathrm { s } } = 24.4 ( 5 \sigma , AB ) are reached within 75 % of the survey area .
Thus these observations are significantly deeper than the previous EIS Deep Public Survey which covers the same region .
The image quality is characterized by a point spread function ranging between 0.34″ and 0.65″ FWHM .
The images are registered to a common astrometric grid defined by the GSC 2 with an accuracy of \sim 0.06 \arcsec RMS over the whole field .
The overall photometric accuracy , including all systematic effects , adds up to 0.05 mag .
The data are publicly available from the ESO science archive facility .

Methods : We describe the data reduction , the calibration , and the quality control process .
The final data set is characterized in terms of astrometric and photometric properties , including the PSF and the curve of growth .
We establish an empirical model for the sky background noise in order to quantify the variation of limiting depth and statistical photometric errors over the survey area .
We define a catalog of K _ { \mathrm { s } } -selected sources which contains JHK _ { \mathrm { s } } photometry for 7079 objects .
Differential aperture corrections were applied to the color measurements in order to avoid possible biases as a result of the variation of the PSF .
We briefly discuss the resulting color distributions in the context of available redshift data .
Furthermore , we estimate the completeness fraction and relative contamination due to spurious detections for source catalogs extracted from the survey data .
For this purpose , an empirical study based on a deep K _ { \mathrm { s } } image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is combined with extensive image simulations .

Results : With respect to previous deep near-infrared surveys , the surface density of faint galaxies has been established with unprecedented accuracy by virtue of the unique combination of depth and area of this survey .
We derived galaxy number counts over eight magnitudes in flux up to J = 25.25 , H = 25.0 , K _ { \mathrm { s } } = 25.25 ( in the AB system ) .
Very similar faint-end logarithmic slopes between 0.24 and 0.27 mag ^ { -1 } were measured in the three bands .
We found no evidence for a significant change in the slope of the logarithmic galaxy number counts at the faint end .

Conclusions :