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Discovered in 1535, these islands were the laboratory for Darwin’s groundbreaking evolutionary theories. Despite waves of whalers, pirates, settlers and tourists, they remain, in essence, the way Darwin found them.

IN SOME WAYS, A TRIP TO THE Galápagos Islands is like going to the moon. The animal and plant inhabitants are just as bizarre, frozen in time as they are in various stages of arrested evolutionary development; the volcanic landscape in places just as barren, as anything one could imagine finding on another planet.
The islands were formed by geo-thermal hotspots breaking through the earth’s crust creating still-active volcanoes that rise steeply from the ocean floor and are not a part of a continental land mass. The resulting lack of continental predators, coupled with the islands’ unusual micro-climate – situated on the equator but tempered by the cold Humboldt Current originating around Antarctica – have made the Galápagos archipelago an anomaly in nature. After spending only five weeks exploring the Galápagos Islands, Darwin wrote his landmark book on evolution, The Origin of Species, based on his observations of the flora and fauna there.
The archipelago was officially discovered in 1535 by Spanish navigator Tomás de Berlanga, who named it after the gigantic land tortoises he found there in abundance. But for many early explorers, the unpredictable currents and winds surrounding the islands made landfall difficult. They watched as they drifted by islands in the distance shrouded in mist. Unsure if what they saw was real, they called them “The Enchanted Isles,” and for a little while longer the Galápagos remained the realm of the animals.


The highlands of Santa Cruz Island remain lush, but with some 10,000 human inhabitants, the island is threatened by development.
BEGINNING in the early 19th century, whalers, buccaneers and privateers began to frequent the islands. Discovering that the giant tortoises could be kept alive without food or water for months in the holds of their ships, providing a long-lasting food supply, they nearly decimated their populations. Later, oilers killed tortoises for their oil, and fur traders hunted the endemic fur seals. Although these visitors to the islands were just passing through, they left behind domesticated animals – dogs, cats, pigs, goats and cattle – that continue to endanger the native species and their habitats.
The beginning of the 20th century saw the arrival of fishermen and farmers from the mainland, followed by Europeans. By the late 1960s the first tourists had arrived. With the establishment of the Galápagos Islands as a national park, 97 percent of the uncolonized land area of the archipelago is today under government protection. Tourists are not allowed on park-controlled islands without a licensed guide; even so, 70,000 visitors came to the islands last year.
Fortunately, through the conservation efforts of Ecuadorian and United Nations entities, the islands still retain 95 percent of their original pre-human quota of species. In an exemplary case of man’s intervention attempting to make reparations for man’s intrusion, the Galápagos Islands remain a place where each person who visits comes away with an invaluable souvenir: the knowledge that this world is a fragile, connected system and that each one of us, through our actions, makes a difference, for better or worse.

Photo by Glen Allison