Galápagos National Park
Parque nacional Galápagos
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Interesting facts
- The Galápagos Islands were the very first entry on UNESCO's World Heritage List, inscribed in 1978 as site number 1.
- Lonesome George, the last known Pinta Island tortoise, was found in 1971 and died in 2012; his preserved body is displayed in the park.
- The Española tortoise recovered from only 14 known adults in the early 1970s to more than 2,300 animals by 2020 through captive breeding.
- Between 1997 and 2006, Project Isabela removed more than 140,000 feral goats from Isabela, Santiago and Pinta to save native vegetation.
- More than 700 introduced plant species now grow on the islands, outnumbering the roughly 500 native and endemic plants.
- The Galápagos penguin is the only penguin species living in the tropics.
- Ecuador formally annexed the islands on 12 February 1832, more than three years before Darwin arrived aboard the Beagle.
- The park was created in 1959, exactly a century after Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
- Thirteen species of finches, often called Darwin's finches, are found only here and became a textbook case of evolution by natural selection.
- From 2007 to 2010 the islands were on UNESCO's list of World Heritage in Danger because of invasive species, tourism growth and immigration.
Why it is worth it
Galápagos National Park covers about 97 percent of the land of the Galápagos archipelago, a scatter of more than a hundred volcanic islands, islets and rocks straddling the equator some 900 km west of mainland Ecuador. Only the settled corners of Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal, Isabela and Baltra lie outside it. The islands have been built by a hotspot beneath the Pacific floor, and they are young in geological terms: the oldest are around three million years old, while Fernandina, in the west, is only about 65,000 years old and still erupts regularly. Landscapes of lava and ash change from island to island, and the cold Humboldt Current gives this equatorial sea surprisingly cool water.
What makes the park unlike anywhere else is the animal life and its lack of fear. Marine iguanas, the only lizards in the world that feed in the sea, pile up on the lava to warm themselves after diving; giant tortoises graze in the highlands; flightless cormorants, Galápagos penguins, blue-footed boobies and, on Española, waved albatrosses breed within a few steps of the trail. At Tortuga Bay on Santa Cruz, white-tip reef sharks cruise the shallows in groups. The islands first entered European records in 1535, when the ship of the bishop Tomás de Berlanga drifted there off course, and Charles Darwin spent five weeks in the archipelago aboard HMS Beagle in 1835 — observations that later fed into his thinking on how species change.
The park was declared in 1959, making it Ecuador's first national park, and began operating in 1968; the surrounding Galápagos Marine Reserve followed in 1986. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz works alongside the park on long-running programmes to remove introduced species and to restore tortoise populations, and visits to the protected sites are made on marked trails, usually with licensed naturalist guides.
Getting there
The islands are reached by air from Quito and Guayaquil on the mainland. Flights land at Seymour Airport (GPS) on Baltra, a short crossing from Santa Cruz, or at San Cristóbal Airport (SCY); passengers and luggage go through biosecurity checks to keep new species out of the islands. Between the islands, travel is by boat.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Galápagos National Park was established in 1959. It began operation in 1968, and it is Ecuador's first national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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