Ecuador: 5-Day Galápagos cruise
🌋 The Galápagos Islands — Where Evolution Did Its Best Work
Right then. The Galápagos.
If you’re the sort of person who glazes over when someone mentions Darwin, evolution, or indeed anything that requires you to think too hard before breakfast, I’d gently suggest you skip this bit. For the rest of you — stick with me, because these islands are, without question, one of the most extraordinary places I have ever had the considerable privilege of visiting. And I’ve been to Wolverhampton, so I know what I’m talking about.
The Galápagos Islands sit roughly 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean — far enough away to feel genuinely remote, close enough to Ecuador that you can get there on a moderately priced flight without remortgaging the house. The archipelago consists of 16 main islands and a further 6 smaller ones, scattered across an area of roughly 17,000 square miles of ocean and formed by volcanic activity over the course of millions of years. They are, in geological terms, entirely new — the oldest islands emerged from the sea perhaps five million years ago, while others are still forming today. They’re essentially lumps of hardened lava that have, against all reasonable expectation, become one of the most biodiverse places on the entire surface of the earth. Nature, it turns out, is remarkably good at making something out of nothing.
The islands straddle the equator, which you might think would make them unbearably hot and humid. They are not. The reason for this is the Humboldt Current — a vast river of cold water flowing northward along the South American coastline from Antarctica — together with the Cromwell Current, which wells up from the deep ocean floor directly beneath the archipelago. These currents keep the water and air temperature surprisingly moderate and create the extraordinary mix of cold- and warm-water marine life that makes the Galápagos so utterly unlike anywhere else on earth. You get Antarctic penguins rubbing shoulders with tropical sea lions, which by any reasonable reckoning shouldn’t be possible. And yet there they are.
📜 A Brief History, Since You Asked
The islands were first stumbled upon by Europeans in 1535, when Tomás de Berlanga, the Bishop of Panama, accidentally drifted off course while sailing to Peru. He wasn’t looking for them, didn’t particularly want them, and by all accounts wasn’t terribly impressed. His account of the experience, written to King Carlos I of Spain, noted the giant tortoises and the remarkable tameness of the wildlife — animals that had never encountered humans and had consequently never developed any particular fear of them. He also noted the extreme difficulty of finding fresh water, the brutal heat, and the general inhospitability of the place. The Spanish, never ones to miss a naming opportunity, called them Las Encantadas — “The Enchanted Islands” — presumably because of the strange ocean currents that made navigation around them a complete nightmare, giving the impression that the islands were actually moving about. The official name, Galápagos, comes from the old Spanish word for saddle, galapago, referring to the distinctive saddle-like shape of the shell on the giant tortoises they found there. Priorities, evidently, were different in the sixteenth century.
For much of the following two centuries, the islands were left largely to their own devices, visited mainly by English pirates — buccaneers with splendidly villainous names like William Dampier, Ambrose Cowley, and Bartholomew Sharp — who found them a convenient staging post from which to lurk about and attack the Spanish treasure galleons laden with gold and silver that sailed up the South American coast. Cowley, who visited in 1684, produced the first rough charts of the archipelago and took the liberty of naming several of the islands after prominent English noblemen and naval officers. The Spanish, understandably, were not best pleased about any of this. The pirates, equally understandably, didn’t much care. It was Cowley who named what we now call Isabela Island after the English Duke of Albemarle, and Floreana after King Charles II. The Spanish names came later and then the English names came back again, which is how you end up with an island with four different names and a population that has stopped trying to keep track.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the pirates had largely been replaced by American and British whalers, who used the islands as a resupply point during their operations in the Pacific. Sperm whales were abundant in these waters, and the whaling industry — particularly out of Nantucket and New Bedford in Massachusetts — was extraordinarily lucrative. The whalers also discovered, to their considerable delight, that the giant tortoises could be stacked in the holds of ships and kept alive for months without food or water, serving as a handy source of fresh meat on the long voyages home. This was an innovation the tortoises themselves found considerably less delightful. Estimates suggest that somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 of them were removed from the islands by whalers and fur sealers during this period — a figure so staggering that it is difficult to fully absorb. Several subspecies were hunted to complete extinction. Humans, as a species, have a great deal to answer for.
Then, on the 15th of September 1835, HMS Beagle dropped anchor off Chatham Island — now called San Cristóbal — carrying among her crew a rather thoughtful young gentleman of 26 by the name of Charles Robert Darwin. Darwin was serving as the ship’s naturalist on a survey voyage that had already been going for nearly four years and would continue for almost another year more, circumnavigating the globe and accumulating specimens and observations at every stop. Darwin spent five weeks visiting four of the islands — San Cristóbal, Floreana, Isabela, and Santiago — and it was here, observing the wildlife with the sort of meticulous attention to detail that most of us reserve for checking the football scores, that he began to formulate the ideas that would eventually turn the scientific world, and indeed Western civilisation, completely upside down.
What caught his attention, famously, were the finches. He noted — though initially without quite appreciating the full significance of what he was observing — that each island had its own distinct variety, with beaks shaped quite differently according to the particular food available on that island. Some were adapted for cracking hard seeds, others for probing the flowers of cactus plants, others still for catching insects. The same basic bird, he gradually realised, had adapted over countless generations to suit its particular environment. This was the seed — if you’ll forgive the pun — of what became his theory of natural selection, which he spent the next two decades developing, refining, and, frankly, worrying about, before finally publishing it in On the Origin of Species in November 1859. The book caused an almighty fuss, as you’d expect when someone quietly suggests to a Victorian society that we’re all essentially descended from the same primordial soup. Some people — scientists, progressive thinkers — were thrilled. Others — mainly those in the Church of England, and a good many others besides — were considerably less so. The ensuing debate, famously crystallised in the 1860 confrontation between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at Oxford, reverberated through Victorian society for decades. It hasn’t entirely stopped reverberating yet.
It is worth noting, since the Galápagos rather encourages these sorts of reflections, that Darwin himself was quite a different figure from the confident revolutionary that popular mythology has made him. He was deeply anxious about the implications of his theory, corresponded endlessly with his friend the botanist Joseph Hooker before publication, and apparently kept his ideas largely to himself for twenty years partly out of genuine concern about the distress they would cause. It was only when the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace independently arrived at the same theory in 1858 and wrote to Darwin describing it that Darwin finally moved to publish. The two men, to their considerable credit, presented their findings jointly to the Linnean Society of London on the 1st of July 1858 — one of the more civilised moments in the history of scientific priority disputes.
Ecuador, to its credit, declared the Galápagos a national park in 1959 — the centenary of Darwin’s great publication, which was a rather neat piece of timing. The Charles Darwin Research Station, which had been established on Santa Cruz Island that same year, began the long work of protecting the archipelago’s extraordinary wildlife, including the tortoises that had suffered so grievously at the hands of the whalers. In 1978, UNESCO recognised the islands as a World Heritage Site — the very first place in the world to receive that designation, which tells you something about how seriously the international community took them. In 1986, the surrounding waters were declared a marine reserve, and in 1990 the whole lot became a whale sanctuary. So the tortoises, at least, are now rather better looked after than they were in the whaling days. The captive breeding programme has returned several subspecies from the very brink of extinction, which given what the whalers did to them is the least we could manage.
🗓️ Our Itinerary
- Day 1: Santa Cruz Island
- Day 2: South Plazas Island and Santa Fe Island
- Day 3: Española Island
- Day 4: Floreana Island
- Day 5: Santa Cruz Island
🌅 Day 1 — Santa Cruz Island: In Which We Arrive and Are Immediately Upstaged by Sea Lions
We had an early transfer from Quito to the airport, which is the sort of thing that sounds perfectly manageable when you’re booking it from the comfort of home several months in advance, and considerably less manageable at half past four in the morning when the alarm goes off and you realise that a cup of tea is going to require more conscious effort than you currently possess. Still, we were heading to the Galápagos, so I tried to look enthusiastic. I may have succeeded in a dim sort of way.
The flight from Quito took about three hours, travelling westward over the extraordinary landscape of Ecuador — the Andes giving way to the coastal plain and then the Pacific — before landing not on any of the main inhabited islands but on Baltra, also known as South Seymour Island. Everything in the Galápagos, I should mention, has at least two names: the original Spanish colonial name and the English name given to it by the pirates and whalers who came later. This dual identity is either charming or confusing, depending on how well you slept on the plane. I had slept adequately and found it charming.
Baltra itself is a fairly unremarkable piece of real estate. It is flat, dry, hot, and almost entirely devoid of vegetation beyond a few straggly cacti. During the Second World War, the United States established a significant air base here in 1942, using it to patrol the eastern Pacific for Japanese and German submarines — the Panama Canal, lying just to the north, being of obvious strategic importance. The base performed this function admirably for the duration of the war without, as far as anyone can tell, disturbing the wildlife unduly. After the war ended in 1945, the Americans departed and left virtually everything behind — buildings, equipment, infrastructure — which the Ecuadorian military subsequently inherited and has operated ever since. Today the island is essentially a very flat, very dry, very barren strip of volcanic rock with a landing strip on it. There is absolutely nothing there of any interest whatsoever, which is presumably why they put the airport on it rather than anywhere nicer.
The airport terminal itself is — how to put this diplomatically — compact. It makes Birmingham International look like Dubai. The baggage handling system consists, in its entirety, of someone removing bags from the aircraft hold and placing them on the ground in a more or less random arrangement, after which the passengers descend upon them in what I can only describe as a polite British scrum — though admittedly the equatorial heat and the excitement made it fractionally less polite than usual. There is also a rigorous inspection process at this point: the Galápagos authorities, rightly, are extremely serious about biosecurity, and all baggage is inspected to ensure that no introduced species — plants, insects, soil, food — make their way onto the islands. This took a little while, during which I stood in the sun and sweated quietly.
We were met outside by our guide for the week: a local man named Washington. This struck me as a magnificent name, and I told him so. He seemed mildly accustomed to people mentioning it, with the patience of a man who has been introducing himself for forty years. Washington was a qualified naturalist licensed by the Galápagos National Park Authority, which requires all guides operating within the park to hold official licences, pass rigorous examinations in natural history and conservation, and renew their qualifications regularly. The standard of guiding in the Galápagos is, as a result, genuinely exceptional — these are not people who have memorised a script but people who actually know, in the kind of depth that comes from a lifetime’s close observation, every species on every island. He herded us onto a bus with the practiced efficiency of a man who has done this rather a lot, and we headed down to the marina.
And here, our holiday properly began.
The dock at Baltra had been comprehensively taken over by sea lions. Five or six of them had arranged themselves across the available seating with the relaxed confidence of beings who have absolutely no intention of moving for anyone. They lay draped over the benches like large, whiskery, expensively scented sleeping bags, entirely indifferent to the humans milling around them and making admiring noises. Jack and Emily — who are of an age where large marine mammals sprawled across public furniture are among the funniest things imaginable — were immediately delighted. I have to say, I was fairly amused myself. The sea lions of the Galápagos are Galápagos sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki), a species found only in this archipelago, and their defining characteristic — beyond an almost supernatural ability to occupy benches — is their complete absence of fear of humans. This is not tameability. It is something more remarkable: the wildlife here has simply never been threatened by people in the way that wildlife almost everywhere else on earth has been, and has consequently never developed any instinctive alarm response to our presence. The effect, when you first encounter it, is profoundly disorienting. You keep expecting the animal to move away. It doesn’t.
After a few minutes waiting for a water taxi — the sea lions showed no signs of vacating the benches, so we stood — we were loaded onto the back of a motorised dinghy and bounced across the most extraordinary blue-green water I had seen in quite some time. The colour was almost unreal: the kind of turquoise that you see on travel brochures and assume has been heavily enhanced in post-production. It hadn’t been. The water genuinely is that colour, partly because of the depth and clarity and partly because of the various currents that bring cold, nutrient-rich water up from below, creating conditions in which the sea seems lit from within.
Our vessel for the week was the Guantanamera — a small, no-frills expedition boat carrying just 16 passengers and a crew of 5. I want to be clear that when I say no-frills, I mean it in the best possible sense. This was not a cruise ship. There was no casino, no waterslide, no buffet the size of a football pitch, no entertainment programme involving a man in a sequinned jacket. What there was, was a sensible, well-maintained, comfortable boat crewed by extremely capable and knowledgeable people who cared deeply about the islands they were working in. The small passenger number is not accidental: the Galápagos National Park Authority strictly limits the size of vessels permitted to operate within the park precisely to prevent the kind of mass tourism that has degraded so many other natural wonders. For a week in the Galápagos, this is exactly what you want.
We set off for our first destination — Santa Cruz Island, about an hour’s sail across a sea that was bright and choppy and apparently full of things — and sat out on deck in the equatorial sun. The sky was enormous and deeply, improbably blue, and overhead, circling with the lazy menace of something that has genuinely never had to worry about where its next meal is coming from, were several Magnificent Frigatebirds. These are extraordinary creatures: with a wingspan of up to 2.3 metres, they are among the largest seabirds in the world, and they have evolved — with characteristic Galápagos ingenuity — a feeding strategy that involves stealing food from other birds rather than going to the bother of catching it themselves. This practice, known as kleptoparasitism, involves harassing a booby or a tropicbird that has just successfully caught a fish until it drops it, whereupon the frigatebird scoops it up. It is, by any reasonable measure, deeply unsporting, but it works. The male of the species has a vivid scarlet throat pouch which it inflates like a small balloon during mating season to attract females — an approach that, when you think about it, isn’t entirely unlike certain behaviour you can observe in any pub in England on a Friday evening around closing time. They shadowed us for a while, their great forked tails steering them through the air with ridiculous ease, assessed whether we were likely to produce anything edible, decided we weren’t, and drifted away on the thermals.
We moored up, had lunch — the food on board was excellent throughout the entire week, I should say, and rather better than I had been expecting from a small expedition vessel — and then prepared for our first proper Galápagos experience: the wet beach landing.
A wet beach landing is exactly what it sounds like. You climb over the side of the inflatable dinghy into shallow water and wade ashore. This is not difficult. It is, however, somewhat undignified, particularly if you are wearing a bright orange life jacket and attempting to hold an expensive camera above your head while maintaining what little remains of your dignity against the pull of the surf. I managed it without falling over, which I considered a personal triumph and which the younger members of the party appeared to find insufficiently entertaining.
Washington led us along the sandy beach with the air of a man who is about to show you something rather good and knows it, and within about thirty seconds, the Galápagos had fully and comprehensively delivered on its extraordinary reputation. Marine iguanas — prehistoric, spiky, improbably ugly creatures that look as though they were designed by a committee during a particularly uninspired meeting, possibly on a Friday afternoon — were draped across every available rock in great dark clusters. The Galápagos marine iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) is the world’s only ocean-going lizard, and it really does look the part: dark grey to nearly black, with flattened tails adapted for swimming, blunt faces, and the general demeanour of something that has been on earth considerably longer than you and is in absolutely no hurry about anything. Which, to be fair, it has been. The species is thought to have arrived on the islands from South America perhaps 4.5 million years ago — a single ancestral land iguana, presumably carried on a natural raft of vegetation — and has been quietly evolving ever since. They feed entirely on underwater algae, diving to depths of up to 12 metres and holding their breath for up to an hour. They sneeze salt water, which is how they excrete the excess salt from their marine diet. This I find enormously endearing.
The rocks were absolutely alive with Sally Lightfoot crabs (Grapsus grapsus) — vivid, fire-engine red against the dark volcanic stone — darting in and out of crevices with extraordinary speed, picking at algae and bits of detritus, fleeing nothing in particular and returning immediately. The contrast between the black lava, the red crabs, and the impossible blue of the sea beyond was almost aggressively beautiful. I stood and looked at it for rather longer than strictly necessary and thought about how strange it is that places like this actually exist.
Along the beach, Washington pointed out the indentations in the sand left by nesting green sea turtles — Chelonia mydas — the females having hauled themselves ashore during recent nights to lay their eggs in the warm sand. Female green turtles return to lay their eggs on the same beach where they were born, navigating by the Earth’s magnetic field across thousands of miles of open ocean to find it — a feat of navigation so improbable that it makes losing your phone charger feel like a relatively minor failing. The eggs incubate in the warm sand for approximately two months before the hatchlings emerge and make their frantic dash for the water, running the gauntlet of any number of things that would dearly like to eat them. Nature, as I may have mentioned before, is magnificent and entirely without sentiment.
A short walk inland brought us to a brackish lagoon — not much to look at on its own terms, just a shallow, greenish body of water surrounded by scraggly mangrove and salt-tolerant scrub — but standing in it, apparently perfectly content, was a single Galápagos flamingo. There are only around 600 individual flamingos in the entire Galápagos archipelago, making each sighting a genuine event rather than the commonplace spectacle you get at a zoo. The Galápagos flamingo is a subspecies of the American flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber), but smaller and paler than those you’d find in the Caribbean, feeding on the tiny brine shrimp (Artemia) and algae that give them their characteristic pink colouring. The intensity of the colour, Washington explained, depends directly on how much of the right food the bird has been eating — a flamingo on a poor diet fades to almost white. This one was a healthy, rather good pink, and it regarded us with the haughty indifference that flamingos seem to have perfected as a species, one-legged, still, unbothered. We stood and watched it for rather longer than strictly necessary. This was becoming a theme.
To round off the afternoon, we pulled on wetsuits and snorkelling gear — a process that, for those of us who are not 25 and extremely flexible, takes significantly longer than the younger members of the party would lead you to believe is normal — and waded out from the beach into the water alongside the rocks. What happened next was, frankly, ridiculous. The reef fish here were extraordinary: parrotfish the size of a medium dog in colours that appeared to have been chosen by someone who had just discovered paint and was making up for lost time; triggerfish in electric blues and yellows; angelfish in patterns of such geometric precision that they looked designed rather than evolved. Below us, the sandy bottom was clean and bright, crossed by shafts of light. And then, from nowhere in particular, a sea lion appeared — young, sleek, absurdly fast — and shot past us so close that we could see its eyes, which appeared to contain a mild contempt for our paddling efforts, before disappearing back into the blue. I am not ashamed to say I made an undignified noise.
All too soon — it always is — Washington rounded us up and we clambered back into the dinghy and returned to the Guantanamera, which had repositioned into a sheltered bay for the evening. The anchor went down, and we sat out on deck as the sun went down over the Pacific in the unhurried way that equatorial sunsets have, the sky cycling through colours that would look completely unconvincing in a painting. I sat there with a cold drink and thought, not for the last time that week, that this was a very long way indeed from Wolverhampton, and that sometimes that is precisely the point.
🦎 Day 2: South Plazas Island & Santa Fe Island
We woke to the gentle, rhythmic rocking of the boat — which, I’ll be honest, was considerably more pleasant than the alarm clock back home, a device whose sole purpose appears to be the destruction of any remaining goodwill towards mornings. Shuffling upstairs in the sort of half-awake stupor that passes for consciousness at that hour, we sat down for our first proper breakfast aboard the Guantanamera.
The Guantanamera, named after the famous Cuban song written by Joseíto Fernández in 1929 and later popularised worldwide by Pete Seeger and the Sandpipers in 1966, is one of those tunes that every Spanish guitarist in every beach bar in every tourist resort in the world has been cheerfully murdering ever since. If you’ve sat through a four-song set in Lanzarote, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Our boat, however, bore the name with considerably more dignity than that. She was a comfortable, well-appointed vessel — around sixteen metres, carrying eight or so passengers, with an upper deck for watching the world go by and a dining area below where, I was pleased to discover, nobody arrived with a guitar. The crew knew exactly what they were doing, which put them one up on me immediately.
After breakfast — eggs, fruit, coffee strong enough to strip paint, which in the circumstances was precisely what was required — we motored our way to our first stop of the day.
🌋 South Plazas Island: thirteen hectares of concentrated mayhem
South Plazas Island sits just off the eastern coast of Santa Cruz, the largest inhabited island in the Galápagos archipelago, roughly a thousand kilometres off the coast of Ecuador. It is, by any objective measure, tiny — covering barely thirteen hectares, which for those of you who have rightly abandoned all pretence of understanding metric, is roughly the size of a modest English farm. It was formed, like much of the archipelago, by geological uplift: a slab of lava rock pushed upward by the slow movement of the Nazca tectonic plate over a volcanic hotspot deep beneath the ocean floor, a process that has been quietly sculpting these islands for somewhere between three and five million years, entirely indifferent to human opinion on the matter.
Despite its dimensions — and “dimensions” is being generous — South Plazas punches spectacularly above its weight in terms of wildlife. The Galápagos Islands, of course, are the place that inspired Charles Darwin to arrive at his rather inconvenient thought about evolution following his visit in September and October of 1835, aboard HMS Beagle under the command of Captain Robert FitzRoy. Darwin spent five weeks in the archipelago, collecting specimens and making the meticulous observations that would eventually — after two decades of characteristic Victorian caution — become On the Origin of Species, published in November 1859. South Plazas is very much the sort of place that would have kept him scribbling until his hand fell off.
We came ashore via what the guides call a dry landing — meaning you step from the inflatable dinghy directly onto a concrete jetty rather than wading through water, which sounds perfectly straightforward until you discover what the jetty is covered in.
Sea lion. Not metaphorically. Actual sea lions. Galápagos sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki), to be precise — a species endemic to these islands, formally described by the Norwegian zoologist Niels Kristian Wollebæk in 1910, and found absolutely nowhere else on earth. There were perhaps thirty of them distributed across the jetty with the sort of territorial completeness that suggested they had decided, as a collective, that the concept of sharing public space with humans was fundamentally unappealing. They lounged about like a group of retired civil servants who’ve collectively decided that the concept of moving is, at its core, overrated and probably bad for the joints.
The jetty was spectacularly slippery — a combination of wet rock, sea lion residue, and what I can only diplomatically describe as the inevitable consequences of a large colony of marine mammals treating the place as their personal bathroom. I managed to stay upright, which I considered a personal triumph of no small significance. The sea lions viewed our arrival with complete and utter indifference. This is one of the genuinely extraordinary things about the Galápagos: the wildlife has had so little exposure to predators, and humans have been present in a regulated, non-threatening capacity for long enough, that the animals simply have not developed a fear response. A Galápagos sea lion will open one eye to check you haven’t done anything interesting, close it again, and resume whatever deeply satisfying dream it was having. They are, in short, the smuggest animals on earth, and they have absolutely earned it.
🌵 Iguanas, cacti, and the long game
A little way inland, the island opens out into a landscape that looks, if you squint slightly, like a film set for a spaghetti western — were it not for the sea lions. Tall prickly pear cacti (Opuntia echios) rise up from the rocky ground, their trunks thick and scaly and grey-brown, bark peeling away in great papery sheets, reaching heights of up to ten or twelve feet. The Opuntia cacti of the Galápagos are a fascinating case study in island evolution: on the South American mainland, prickly pears grow as low, ground-hugging shrubs, their spines a sufficient deterrent against being eaten. Here on the islands, however, where giant tortoises and iguanas have been grazing on them for millions of years, the cacti have evolved to grow tall — essentially getting the edible parts out of reach. Arms race, botanical edition.
Arranged at the base of these cacti, with a patience that put the queue at my local Post Office to absolute shame, sat the land iguanas. Galápagos land iguanas (Conolophus subcristatus), first formally described by Thomas Bell in 1825, are stocky, prehistoric-looking creatures with colouring that ranges from mustard yellow through burnt orange and rusty brown — colours that would have looked perfectly at home in a 1970s bathroom. They can grow to around a metre in length, and they live for sixty years or more, which meant, I realised with a slightly queasy sensation, that some of the individuals we were looking at had been alive since the early 1960s, and had been sitting under these very same cacti since before I was born. There is something simultaneously humbling and profoundly irritating about being out-aged by a reptile.
The islands had been going through an unusually dry spell. The El Niño–Southern Oscillation weather system, which periodically sends warm water sweeping across the Pacific and dramatically alters rainfall patterns across the entire region, had produced significant La Niña conditions in 2022 and 2023, and the Galápagos had been feeling the effects ever since. Much of the usual low-growing vegetation — the grasses, herbs, and fallen cactus fruits that the land iguanas depend on for the bulk of their diet — had simply shrivelled up in the drought. The periodic fall of Opuntia flowers from the pads above had become one of the few reliable food sources remaining.
And so the iguanas sat there, motionless, staring upward with an expression of absolute geological patience, waiting for flowers to fall. It was simultaneously one of the most peaceful and most quietly desperate things I’d ever seen. Waiting, in the sun, for something to drop. A metaphor for many things, possibly. I chose not to dwell on it.
The politics around the cacti were, it turned out, rather fierce. The larger dominant males had staked out prime positions around the most productive plants and were defending them with considerable vigour — any intruding male who fancied his chances was seen off with a great deal of head-bobbing, tail-whipping, and general displays of iguana machismo. The female iguanas, as one might reasonably expect, were treated rather differently. Some things, it appears, are genuinely universal.
🌊 The clifftop walk: bachelors, tropicbirds, and rather grim realities
We continued our walk along the clifftop trail on the southern side of the island, where the land rises steeply before dropping away in dramatic black lava cliffs directly into the Pacific, fifty or sixty feet below. The view was, in the proper sense of the word, spectacular: deep blue open ocean, white froth of swell breaking against the base of the cliffs, and — wheeling overhead in considerable quantities — red-billed tropicbirds (Phaethon aethereus), their long white tail streamers trailing behind them like something from an Edwardian lady’s hat. They nest in crevices along these cliffs, and the air above South Plazas in the breeding season is filled with their extraordinary, carrying calls.
On the clifftop rocks, we encountered a rather different population of sea lions from the jolly, comatose lot on the jetty. These were the bachelor males — younger animals, or less dominant older ones, driven out of the main breeding colonies by the large established bulls. In Galápagos sea lion society, a small number of dominant males control territories that include the best beaches and, with them, access to the females. Those who can’t displace a territory holder are pushed to the margins — and these clifftop rocks are very much the margins. They lounged about looking faintly sorry for themselves, which, all things considered, seemed a perfectly reasonable response.
And then, at the top of the island, we found something that brought the children up short.
The skeletons of a sea lion and an iguana, bleached brilliantly white by the sun, lying a few feet apart on the dark lava. Jack and Emily were fascinated in the way that children are — that perfectly unselfconscious mixture of curiosity and mild horror that adults tend to lose somewhere around the age of twelve. It was, objectively, fine. Death in the natural world is not a failure. It is, as Washington pointed out with characteristic gentleness, the mechanism by which the whole thing works.
But nearby, two or three young sea lion pups were clearly in serious distress. They were thin — visibly, painfully thin — and weak, separated from their mothers. The drought conditions that had affected the iguanas had also, through a chain of ecological consequence, disrupted the fish populations the sea lions depend on, in some cases causing nursing mothers to abandon pups they could no longer sustain.
Emily asked Washington directly whether someone would rescue them.
Washington is not a man who deals in comfortable untruths. He explained, carefully and with evident feeling, that the Galápagos operates on a strict policy of non-intervention. This is a protected wilderness under the administration of the Galápagos National Park, established in 1959 and governed since 1998 under the Special Law for the Galápagos, which enshrines the principle that human interference with natural processes is prohibited except in cases of introduced species control. This is not a safari park. The animals are not managed. Survival of the fittest is not just a phrase here — it is the operating principle of the entire archipelago, written into law and enforced with genuine conviction.
Emily took it on the chin better than I did, frankly.
🦭 New life, and the business with the snorkel gear
We made our way back down to the shoreline and spent a good while watching the sea lion pups playing in the shallows. Sea lion pups are, objectively, one of the most preposterous things in nature — all enormous liquid eyes and clumsy, disproportionate flippers and apparently unlimited enthusiasm for falling over, rolling sideways, and generally conducting themselves as though the concept of coordination is an interesting theory they’ve heard about but haven’t yet found time to investigate. Among them, we spotted something that stopped us all quite suddenly: a newborn pup, only a matter of hours old, coat still dark and damp, movements the tentative, unsteady efforts of something that has only very recently discovered it has a body. Its mother was nudging it gently, persistently, steadily towards the water — not rushing, not forcing, but guiding, introducing it to the sea for the very first time with an unhurried patience that, after the grim realities of the clifftop, was a genuine and considerable relief.
Life arriving, with apparent optimism, in spite of everything.
Then it was back to the Guantanamera and on to stop number two.
🏝 Santa Fe Island: the most beautiful bay you’ll see this side of a screensaver
Santa Fe Island is a slightly different proposition from South Plazas. Geologically, it’s something of an anomaly in the archipelago: rather than being formed by volcanic activity in the conventional sense, Santa Fe is thought to have been created largely by upward faulting — tectonic forces pushing a block of older seafloor crust upward rather than building a new volcanic cone from the mantle below. The island is, as a result, older than many of its neighbours, and geologists estimate the rock at something in the region of four million years — roughly contemporaneous with the oldest islands in the chain. It sits about twenty-four kilometres south-east of Santa Cruz, and as we motored into the bay, the view that greeted us was, I’ll be honest, genuinely spectacular.
Santa Fe Bay is one of the most beautiful natural anchorages in the Galápagos — a wide, protected sweep of turquoise water in a shade that doesn’t occur naturally in Britain except possibly in one or two Cornish coves at peak summer if the sun is at precisely the right angle and you’re squinting. The bay is ringed by white sand and backed by dense dry forest of Opuntia cacti and Palo Santo trees, the latter of which give off a distinctive resinous, incense-like smell — “palo santo” meaning, literally, “holy wood” in Spanish, a name given to it throughout South America because burning it was believed to have purifying and spiritual properties. The Galápagos version (Bursera graveolens) is the same species used in Andean religious ceremonies, a fact that Washington mentioned and that caused Emily to ask seventeen follow-up questions about whether we could take some home in our hand luggage.
It was the sort of view that makes you wonder why you ever bothered with Norfolk. I say this with genuine respect for Norfolk, which has its own bleak and magnificent charms, but this was not Norfolk.
🤿 Into the water: dignity officially suspended
After lunch — which I shall not dwell on, as this is meant to be about wildlife and not sandwiches — we were given the glorious news that we were free to swim off the back of the boat. We kitted ourselves out in masks, fins and wetsuits, which — and I cannot stress this sufficiently — do absolutely nothing for one’s dignity regardless of age, build, or level of self-confidence. There is no elegant way to put on a wetsuit. There is no graceful position in which to stand on a boat deck holding a pair of fins. You simply commit to the process and try not to catch anyone’s eye.
We jumped in. The water was clear and, by Galápagos standards, surprisingly warm — the temperature of the ocean around Santa Fe is influenced by the competing effects of the cold Humboldt Current, which sweeps up from the Antarctic along South America’s western coast, and the warmer waters that push down from the north. In drought years or warmer El Niño periods, the surface water can reach the mid-twenties Celsius. On this particular afternoon, it felt considerably more welcoming than any British beach I’ve encountered in recent memory.
Almost immediately there were fish. Not vast shoals of anything particularly dramatic — a few wrasse, some yellow-tailed surgeonfish, the black-and-yellow striped sergeant majors (Abudefduf saxatilis) that are more or less ubiquitous throughout tropical and subtropical Atlantic and Pacific waters and that Darwin almost certainly also encountered — but fish, pottering about in the shallows quite contentedly and entirely unbothered by the group of goggling, fin-flapping humans who’d just dropped in on them. One of the more noticeable things about snorkelling in the Galápagos is not the extraordinary things you see — though there are those — but the complete indifference with which everything regards you. The fish don’t flee. The sea lions don’t hide. Evolution in this archipelago proceeded, for millions of years, largely without large mammalian predators, and the result is a wildlife population that simply hasn’t developed the reflexive terror response that animals elsewhere have learned to apply to human beings. You are, in effect, irrelevant. It’s unexpectedly humbling.
As we swam in towards the shoreline, we began to notice shapes moving through the water ahead of us: Galápagos sea lions, this time in their element, skipping and darting through the shallows with a fluid, almost impossibly graceful ease that made our own aquatic efforts look embarrassingly agricultural.
After a while we climbed back aboard the inflatable dinghy — which involves rather more undignified scrambling, gripping and collapsing than the brochure photographs suggest — and motored across to the opposite shore of the bay for a second snorkel. This time, things got considerably more interesting.
🦭 Sea lions, somersaults, and teeth
The sea lions on this side of the bay were curious. Not passively curious, in the way that a cat sometimes briefly acknowledges your existence before deciding it doesn’t care. Boundlessly, actively, almost aggressively curious, in the manner of a Labrador that’s found a novel smell and has decided the only appropriate response is to investigate it with every sense simultaneously. They swam directly towards us, peering into our masks from a distance of a few inches with their enormous, dark, liquid eyes — which are, up close, extraordinarily expressive. Galápagos sea lions have evolved particularly large eyes as an adaptation for hunting in low-light conditions and at depth, capable of seeing clearly at up to a couple of hundred metres below the surface. At a range of three inches, they are frankly overwhelming.
They are, when you are actually in the water with them, almost impossibly charming. Washington, who has clearly performed this routine many times and has the underwater showmanship of a man who genuinely loves his work, dived down and performed a series of twists, somersaults and barrel rolls beneath the surface. The sea lions, delighted, immediately copied him — and then went further, adding their own improvisations, nudging him with their muzzles, darting past at high speed, generally performing with the exuberant enthusiasm of animals that have decided this is the best game anyone has ever invented. They are, in essence, enormous aquatic dogs. I mean that as the highest possible compliment, and I say it as someone who has owned dogs and found them frequently more sensible company than people.
It should be noted, however, that for all their considerable charm, Galápagos sea lions are not entirely without hazard, and this is worth mentioning. The dominant territorial bulls are aggressive, and they are large animals — up to 250 kilograms — with perfectly functional teeth and no particular inhibition about using them on anything they consider a threat to their territory. Karen had a useful reminder of this when a large male swept past her at considerable speed, rather closer than was entirely comfortable, his mouth open just enough to make the point clearly. She was fine. She is, in general, more composed about these things than I am. I chose, at precisely that moment, to be examining a particularly interesting piece of coral in the other direction, which I think was entirely the correct decision and not, as has been subsequently suggested, cowardice.
🐢 The sea turtles: a hundred million years of not caring
We climbed back into the dinghy and headed towards a sheltered area on the far side of the bay — a spot that Washington, from long experience, knew was frequented by Pacific green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas). The green sea turtle is one of the largest hard-shelled sea turtles in the world, with adults typically reaching a metre in length and weighing anywhere between 100 and 200 kilograms. It is also one of the oldest surviving reptile lineages on earth: the family Cheloniidae, to which it belongs, goes back roughly a hundred million years, meaning that green sea turtles were navigating the world’s oceans when T. rex was still a going concern. They have survived five mass extinction events. They have outlasted every major predator that ever threatened them except, ironically, the most recent one. They have, as a species, earned the right to look mildly unimpressed by everything, and they exercise that right consistently.
We slipped back into the water and found ourselves within a few feet of several of these magnificent creatures, resting quietly on the sandy bottom in the characteristic way of turtles in a relaxed state. Green sea turtles are air-breathers, of course — they retained their terrestrial lung structure from their evolutionary ancestors — and must surface to breathe every ten minutes or so when resting, or more frequently when active. So we trod water, watching, and eventually each turtle rose slowly, unhurriedly, and with tremendous dignity to the surface, passing within inches of us on the way up, pausing briefly to breathe, and then descending again at precisely the pace it considered appropriate. Up close they are extraordinary: the shell patterned and worn and ancient-looking, etched with the record of their years; the eyes calm and dark and entirely unfathomable; the whole animal radiating a quality that I can only describe as deep, unhurried authority. I’ve watched a lot of wildlife over the years, in a lot of places. This was genuinely something else.
🏖 The beach landing: rules are for humans
All too soon — and “all too soon” is not even close to capturing it — we returned to the Guantanamera, peeled off the wetsuits (equally undignified in reverse), and attempted to reassemble some vestige of human dignity before the day’s final outing: a beach landing on Santa Fe Island itself.
The beach was home to a sizeable sea lion colony — nursing mothers arranged in comfortable clusters, juveniles squabbling cheerfully over nothing in particular, and several enormous bulls arranged on the sand in positions of complete catalepsy. The Galápagos National Park rules are clear on this point: visitors must maintain a minimum distance of two metres from the wildlife at all times. This is a sensible and well-intentioned rule. The animals, being animals that have not been briefed on the rules, do not maintain a two-metre distance from you. On more than one occasion, a sea lion pup materialised directly behind one of us without any warning whatsoever — having apparently approached from nowhere in that silent, boneless, entirely unannounced way that sea lion pups have — which produced some remarkably undignified squeaking from the humans involved, and considerable amusement from the pup.
Jack and Emily were, in a word, thrilled. Which made the whole day — the early start, the slippery dock of approximately zero friction, the sadness of the clifftop, the business with the wetsuits, Karen’s incident with the large and emphatic bull, my strategic interest in that piece of coral at the relevant moment — entirely, completely, and without reservation worth it.
🌊 Day 3: Española Island — Boobies, Albatrosses, and the Pacific’s Worst Alarm Clock
The Pacific Ocean, it turns out, does not particularly care about you. It did not care about Charles Darwin when he made his famous voyage aboard HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836, and it did not care about me, a middle-aged Englishman from somewhere considerably less historically significant, lying rigid in a bunk aboard the Guantanamera somewhere in the dark small hours, wondering if I was about to be deposited onto the cabin floor.
The wind had been building steadily overnight, and by the time we were properly out in open water — properly being the operative word — the boat had made her feelings about the swell abundantly clear. The Galápagos archipelago sits roughly a thousand kilometres off the coast of Ecuador, straddling the equator, and the open stretches of ocean between islands are not, shall we say, sheltered. The Pacific is the largest ocean on Earth, covering about 165 million square kilometres, and I can confirm it feels every bit as large as that sounds when you’re attempting to sleep in it.
Our bunks were compact. That’s the diplomatic version. Narrow is more accurate — the kind of narrow that invites quiet existential reflection in the small hours. You lie completely still, arms at your sides, and you think: I chose this. I paid for this. I am on holiday. The main concern occupying my thoughts — more than I would comfortably admit in polite company — was the rolling. The ocean rollers were arriving at an angle that gave the boat a particular sideways lurch every so often, and each time I found myself conducting a rapid mental calculation about whether this was the one that would pitch me clean across the cabin. It never was. Small mercies, as I believe I said on more than one occasion.
🏖️ Gardner Bay — Sea Lions, Crabs, and a Near-Miss for Jack
Our first landing of the day was at Gardner Bay, on the northeastern coast of Española Island — the southernmost island in the Galápagos archipelago, and one of the oldest, thought to be somewhere between three and five million years old, which puts my own aching joints into some perspective. And I’ll say this without qualification: it was absolutely worth the wobbly night.
Gardner Bay is one of those beaches. You know the type — the ones used on travel agency posters and desktop wallpapers and the fronts of holiday brochures, the ones that make you feel slightly cheated when you arrive somewhere else and it doesn’t look like that. This one does look like that. A long, sweeping arc of fine white coral sand — the sand gets its colour partly from the bleached remains of coral and shells — curving around a bay of water that shifts from pale turquoise in the shallows to deep sapphire further out. It is, in the most literal sense of the word, ridiculous. The kind of beautiful that makes you feel slightly embarrassed on behalf of everywhere else you’ve ever been.
The morning had been designated what our guide Washington called “leisure time.” Washington — a certified Galápagos National Park naturalist guide, as all guides on the islands are required to be under regulations established in 1959 when the park was founded — delivered this information with the particular air of a man who knew we were going to find it anything but leisurely. He was right. In the Galápagos, leisure time essentially means you’re free to wander about being quietly gobsmacked at your own pace, without anyone formally pointing at things.
We took a slow stroll along the beach. This sounds perfectly straightforward until you factor in the sea lions.
The Galápagos sea lion — Zalophus wollebaeki — is a species with a slightly complicated taxonomic history. For most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scientists assumed they were simply a regional population of the California sea lion (Zalophus californianus). It wasn’t until 1953 that they were formally reclassified as their own distinct species, unique to the Galápagos and a small colony on Isla de la Plata off the Ecuadorian coast. They number somewhere around 50,000 individuals across the archipelago — which sounds like a lot until you’re on a beach with several hundred of them and realise that, to a sea lion, you are a minor inconvenience at most and entirely irrelevant at best.
They have had no natural land predators for so long — their main threats in the water are sharks and orcas — that they’ve collectively arrived at the reasonable conclusion that large upright mammals wandering about on the sand are nothing to worry about. The result is a beach experience unlike anything I’ve encountered in thirty-odd years of travelling to places. The sea lions were everywhere: draped over rocks in the casual manner of people who’ve had a very good lunch and can’t quite be bothered to move; sprawled in loose clusters in the sand; occasionally rolling over to scratch themselves with a rear flipper and then going back to sleep. You don’t so much walk along the beach as conduct a slow negotiation through it — sidestepping a snoozing pup here, giving a wide berth to a large bull there (the bulls can reach up to 250 kilograms, and they do know they own the place). Eye contact with a bull sea lion is a peculiar experience. He looks at you with an expression that suggests he’s already made up his mind about you, and it wasn’t flattering.
Further along the beach, the sand gave way to the dark volcanic rock that constitutes most of the Galápagos shoreline, and here we found a rather different crowd. Marine iguanas — Amblyrhynchus cristatus — are the only sea-going lizards in the world, a fact that Charles Darwin famously found more repellent than impressive. He described them in 1835 as “hideous-looking” and “most disgusting, clumsy lizards,” which rather says more about Darwin’s aesthetic preferences than the iguanas themselves. They evolved from a land iguana ancestor that arrived on the islands several million years ago and gradually adapted to feeding on underwater algae — developing the ability to dive to depths of up to nine metres, slow their heart rate to conserve oxygen, and expel excess salt through special nasal glands, which gives them a slightly encrusted, well-used look about the face. On Española specifically, the marine iguanas are notable for their colouring: during the breeding season, the males turn a striking reddish-green — more vivid than on any other island — thought to be the result of the particular algae species available in the surrounding waters. They were spread across the rocks in their dozens, doing what iguanas do best, which is absolutely nothing, with great commitment.
Scattered amongst them, in cheerful contrast, were Sally Lightfoot crabs — Grapsus grapsus — vivid patches of scarlet and orange against the black lava, moving about with the quick, purposeful energy of creatures who’ve got somewhere to be and are running late. The name “Sally Lightfoot” is thought to come from a Caribbean dancer known for her nimble footwork, which seems entirely appropriate given the way these crabs pick their way across the rocks at considerable speed. They feed on algae, dead tissue from the marine iguanas, and occasionally parasites from the iguanas directly — one of those arrangements that suits everyone and costs nothing.
It was on this stretch of rocky shore that we spotted an American Oystercatcher (Haematopus palliatus) — a striking black-and-white wading bird equipped with a bill the colour of a traffic cone, long and slightly flattened, designed for prising open molluscs. Oystercatchers have been recorded on the Galápagos since the earliest ornithological surveys of the islands in the nineteenth century; they appear in the notes of several naturalists who followed in Darwin’s wake. This one was accompanied by a single chick — small and improbably fluffy, wobbling along behind its parent in the way that small birds do when they haven’t quite sorted out how legs work yet. The adult oystercatcher paid us no attention whatsoever. The chick was too busy concentrating on not falling over. It was, objectively, one of the more charming things I’d seen, and I say that as someone who is not, in general, sentimental about birds.
🌊 The Shallows — Where Sea Lions Come for Small Boys
We eventually made our way back to the main landing point and discovered we had a solid hour to spare before the Zodiac came back for us. I did what any sensible person does in such circumstances: I found a patch of shade, sat down, and opened my book. I had been reading about the history of the Galápagos — a genuinely strange history, it turns out, involving pirates, whalers, a series of wildly optimistic colonisation attempts, and at least one episode that strongly resembles an Agatha Christie plot — and I was getting to a good bit.
Jack and Emily, being eleven and nine respectively and therefore constitutionally incapable of remaining stationary for more than forty-five seconds, made for the sea. This was entirely expected and in principle fine. The slight complication — and it was, in retrospect, a predictable complication, given everything we had already observed that morning — was the sea lions.
Galápagos sea lions, as I may have mentioned, are wholly unbothered by human beings on land. In the water, they transform. They become fast — genuinely fast, capable of bursts up to 35 kilometres per hour — and intensely curious, and they have a particular fondness, it emerged, for children. Specifically, for approaching small children from underwater, surfacing abruptly at very close range, and then looking enormously pleased with themselves.
On two or three occasions — it may have been four; I lost count — a sleek, round head broke the surface approximately eighteen inches from the back of Jack’s knees. Each time, Jack noticed nothing. Each time, his father — that would be me, sitting on the sand with a book, nominally relaxed — experienced what I can only describe as a small private cardiac event. The sea lions were playing. This is what they do. Young sea lions in particular are inquisitive and social and treat the shallows as a personal entertainment facility. I knew this. Intellectually, I was fine with it.
Jack eventually caught on — turned around, found himself face-to-face with a small sea lion at a distance that left no room for dignity on either side — and was absolutely thrilled. He came sprinting up the beach to tell me about it with the energy of a child who has just had the greatest experience of his life. Emily, for her part, had been aware of them the whole time and had been quietly delighted, because Emily, at nine, is considerably calmer than her father.
I, meanwhile, needed a sit down. Which I was already having. So I had a slightly longer one.
🐦 Punta Suárez — Where the Birds Completely Took Over
After lunch back aboard the Guantanamera, we motored around to Punta Suárez, which sits on the southwestern tip of Española Island — the southernmost island in the Galápagos archipelago and, geologically speaking, the oldest. Not old in the way that a 1970s Rover is old, with a certain shabby charm and the occasional oil leak, but genuinely, properly ancient. Española is reckoned to be somewhere between three and five million years old, which puts it well past its volcanic prime. The island formed over a hotspot in the Earth’s mantle — the same geological mechanism responsible for the entire Galápagos chain — but unlike the younger, still-volcanically-active islands to the northwest, such as Isabela and Fernandina, Española has long since drifted off the hotspot on the Nazca Plate and gone quietly into geological retirement. The result, at Punta Suárez at least, is a landscape that looks exactly as you’d expect somewhere that’s had five million years of Pacific weather thrown at it to look: rocky, wind-scoured, and dramatically, almost theatrically, battered. I liked it immediately.
Getting ashore, however, required what I can only describe as a certain willingness to commit to the enterprise. The Pacific swells were running well that afternoon — not dangerously so, but with enough authority to make the whole business feel somewhat precarious. Our Zodiac inflatable, piloted by Washington with the calm indifference of a man who has done this several hundred times before, had to time each approach carefully, waiting for the right moment to nudge us onto the dark volcanic rocks between waves. The technique involves a good deal of watching, a brief surge of engine power, and then a shout from Washington indicating that now would be an excellent time to step out briskly. We managed it without anyone ending up wet, which I regarded as a minor personal triumph. Washington, as I said, seemed entirely unsurprised. He’s done this rather a lot.
The sea lions were on the rocks waiting, naturally, because sea lions are always on the rocks. They are the Galápagos’s unofficial welcoming committee — large, smelly, magnificently indifferent to your presence, and occasionally positioned in exactly the spot you were hoping to step. The marine iguanas were there too, doing their usual impression of prehistoric creatures left over from an earlier, stranger world, which is essentially what they are. Amblyrhynchus cristatus — the world’s only ocean-going lizard — has been on these islands for somewhere in the region of four and a half million years, long before the first human being stood upright and started causing trouble. We picked our way carefully up from the landing area onto firmer ground.
But Punta Suárez isn’t really about the sea lions or the iguanas. Both of those, marvellous as they are, you’ll have encountered elsewhere on the Galápagos circuit. Punta Suárez is about the birds. And in particular, it is about one bird above all others.
The Blue-Footed Booby (Sula nebouxii) is, and I say this with complete affection, one of the most ridiculous-looking animals on Earth. The name itself tells you everything you need to know about how the world has regarded them. “Booby” derives from the Spanish bobo, meaning fool, clown, or dunce — a name bestowed, one imagines with some confidence, by the crews of 16th and 17th-century Spanish galleons who encountered the birds sitting, with magnificent stupidity, on the rigging and decks of their ships. The vessels operating out of the Pacific ports of Callao, on the Peruvian coast, and Paita, further north, were likely among the first Europeans to document the species in any systematic way, though their documentation largely consisted of picking the birds up and eating them, which admittedly does tell you something about how approachable the booby is.
The species wasn’t formally described to science until considerably later. John Gould — the Victorian ornithologist and artist who, among other things, first identified Darwin’s Galápagos finches as distinct species during the same period — catalogued and formally described the Blue-Footed Booby in 1838, working from specimens collected during various Pacific expeditions. By that point, the birds had been being cheerfully harvested by sailors for the better part of two centuries without anyone having bothered to write them up properly. This seems, on reflection, entirely in keeping with the booby’s general luck in life.
The feet, though. The feet are the thing, and they are, I can confirm, genuinely extraordinary. The word “blue” doesn’t quite capture it, which is the sort of thing a travel writer says when they want you to think they’re more observant than you are, but in this case it happens to be true. The colouration isn’t a flat, uniform blue at all — it varies considerably from bird to bird, ranging from a pale, almost milky sky blue through vivid mid-tones to a deep turquoise and on, in the best specimens, to something approaching aquamarine. The colour comes from carotenoid pigments, which the birds obtain directly from the fish in their diet — principally anchovies, sardines, and mackerel, depending on location and season. The more fish, the more pigment, the brighter the feet. This makes the feet a direct, honest, and rather elegant advertisement of the bird’s health and foraging success. A booby with bright, vivid feet is a booby that’s been eating well. A booby with dull, faded feet is a booby that’s been having a difficult quarter.
The females, who are sensibly pragmatic about these things, pay close and careful attention to this when selecting a mate. The males, for their part, perform an elaborate courtship display to show the feet off to best advantage. They lift each foot in turn, with tremendous deliberate ceremony, holding it aloft for inspection before setting it down and lifting the other — an action that looks, for all the world, like a man attempting to show off a new pair of trainers to someone who isn’t quite as impressed as he’d hoped. They also sky-point, spreading their wings and angling their bills upward, and present their prospective mates with small pebbles and twigs, which is either deeply romantic or deeply pathetic depending on your perspective. I found it both, simultaneously, which I think is probably the correct response.
On the ground, the Blue-Footed Booby walks with a peculiar, rolling, flat-footed waddle that is, frankly, comic. There’s no dignified way to put it. They look like someone wearing flippers who hasn’t quite got the hang of them yet. In the air, however, they are a completely different proposition — streamlined, precise, and extraordinarily powerful divers. They hunt by plunge-diving from height, folding their wings back at the last moment and hitting the water at speeds of up to 100 kilometres per hour. Their skulls contain air sacs specifically evolved to absorb the impact. They can also adjust the angle of their dive to pursue fish underwater, using both wings and feet to manoeuvre. It is, by any measure, an impressive piece of engineering for something that walks like that on land.
We moved carefully through the colony — and I do mean carefully, because the nests here are on the ground, each one delineated by a rough ring of accumulated droppings that serves, effectively, as nature’s own boundary marker. You don’t cross the ring. The birds, for their part, simply do not move for you. They sit on their eggs, or on their extraordinarily fluffy white chicks — which look less like birds and more like something a child has made from cotton wool and optimism — and regard you with an expression of mild, faintly bored curiosity. Not alarm, not aggression. Just the look of someone who has seen tourists before and found them, on the whole, a bit underwhelming. Even the birds with tiny, brand-new hatchlings barely shifted as we passed within a metre or so. It is, in a world where most wild animals are sensibly terrified of human beings, genuinely startling — and rather moving — to be regarded with such complete, untroubled indifference.
Washington explained, as we picked our way between nests, that this extraordinary tameness is not naivety. It is the product of genuine evolutionary history. The Galápagos Islands were among the last places on Earth to be reached by human beings — the archipelago wasn’t stumbled upon by Europeans until 1535, when the Bishop of Panama, Tomás de Berlanga, was blown off course on his way to Peru and found himself surrounded by giant tortoises and impertinent birds. By that point, the animals of the Galápagos had been evolving for millions of years in the complete absence of land-based predators and, critically, in the complete absence of human beings. They had, quite literally, never learned to be afraid of us. Darwin, arriving aboard HMS Beagle in September 1835, famously noted in his journal that he was able to push a hawk off a branch with the barrel of his gun. The hawk, one imagines, was puzzled rather than frightened.
The Blue-Footed Boobies of Punta Suárez have not revised this assessment in the intervening centuries, and for once I was grateful that nature had failed to learn the obvious lesson.
🦅 Up the Hill — Hawk Country
We climbed the rocky path that winds up from the coast and into the scrubby, sun-baked interior of the island, and it was here, about halfway up and already regretting my choice of footwear, that we got our first proper look at the Galápagos Hawk (Buteo galapagoensis).
Washington — our guide, a man of impressively economical speech — announced this with the quiet authority of someone introducing you to a head of state. Which, in the context of this particular island ecosystem, is not entirely inaccurate. The Galápagos Hawk is the apex predator here. Top of the food chain. There is nothing on these islands that eats it, worries about it, or is rude to it at parties. It has, in short, got life exactly where it wants it.
It’s a medium-sized buteo — that’s the scientific grouping, for those keeping score at home — closely related to Swainson’s Hawk of mainland North America. The two species are thought to share a common ancestor, with the Galápagos branch having colonised the archipelago at some point in the relatively recent geological past, perhaps somewhere in the region of 150,000 to 300,000 years ago. In the grand sweep of evolutionary time, that’s practically last Tuesday, which makes it all the more remarkable that the bird has so thoroughly made the place its own.
It was formally described as a distinct species in 1876 by the American ornithologist George Newbold Lawrence, who was working from specimens collected during one of the many scientific expeditions that descended on the Galápagos throughout the nineteenth century, all of them presumably inspired by Charles Darwin’s visit in 1835, when he spent five weeks poking about the islands and thinking thoughts that would eventually cause quite a stir. The hawk would have been watching him, too. It watches everything.
There are, according to current estimates, only around 150 breeding pairs remaining in the wild. That makes the Galápagos Hawk one of the rarest raptors on the planet — rarer than the California Condor, rarer than the Philippine Eagle, rarer, frankly, than common sense at a budget airline check-in desk. The population declined sharply after human settlement of the islands, partly through hunting and partly through habitat disturbance, and while it is now a protected species and numbers have stabilised somewhat, it remains listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. There are conservation efforts underway, as there always are, and one hopes they are going better than most.
We were, at this point, rather close to one. It sat on a low rock perhaps four or five metres away and regarded us with the expression of something that has never, in the entire history of its species, felt the need to be concerned about anything. It did not flinch. It did not retreat. It simply looked at us as though we were mildly beneath its notice — tourists in uncomfortable shoes, sweating up a hill to photograph it — which, to be perfectly fair about the whole thing, we probably were.
I have been looked at dismissively by customs officials, shop assistants, and at least one maître d’ in Paris, but nothing quite matches the studied indifference of a bird that genuinely has no predators. It was, I will admit, rather magnificent.
✈️ The Airport — A Brief Encounter with an Absent Albatross
Washington led us across to a flat, open stretch of ground near the southern end of the island and announced that we had arrived at “the Airport.” I assumed this was a guide’s joke — the kind of thing you say to a group of tourists to keep them engaged on a hot afternoon. It was not, entirely.
The area earned its name because the Waved Albatross (Phoebastria irrorata) uses it as a runway. Not metaphorically. Literally. The bird runs along this stretch of flat rock to build up enough forward speed to become airborne, because a Waved Albatross taking off from a standing start is — and I say this with enormous respect for the species — not a thing of beauty. With a wingspan of up to 2.4 metres, it is the largest bird in the entire Galápagos archipelago, and what it gains in aerodynamic magnificence once aloft it very much loses on the ground, where it trundles about with the purposeful gracelessness of a man carrying a wardrobe up a staircase. The runway, therefore, is not optional.
The Waved Albatross was first formally described for science in 1883 by the English ornithologist Frederick DuCane Godman, a Victorian naturalist of the productive sort who seemed to spend most of his life either collecting specimens or cataloguing them. The species belongs to the family Diomedeidae — the albatrosses — a group that has been gliding over the world’s oceans since the Oligocene epoch, roughly 30 million years ago, which puts them in a position to feel fairly settled about their place in the natural order.
What makes Española genuinely extraordinary — and this is one of those facts that sounds made up but isn’t — is that this island is the only place in the entire world where the Waved Albatross breeds. Not one of a few places. The only place. The entire global breeding population, estimated at somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 pairs, returns to this single island every year, arriving from their oceanic wanderings between April and December to mate, nest, and raise their one chick. A tiny volcanic island in the eastern Pacific, about 24 square kilometres in area, is the sole nursery for an entire species. The whole thing has the feel of an arrangement that probably shouldn’t work, and yet here we are.
The birds pair for life and, unlike certain other species that also claim to do this, they appear to mean it. Pairs bond for decades, returning to the same mate and often the same nesting site year after year. Before they get down to business, however, they perform one of the more elaborate courtship displays in the animal kingdom: a sequence of bill-clacking, sky-pointing, exaggerated waddling, and what can only be described as deeply committed mutual honking, all choreographed with a precision that takes young birds several years of practise to master properly. Young albatrosses, in other words, are terrible at this. They are the seabird equivalent of someone who has watched a lot of dance tutorials on YouTube but has not yet been to an actual class.
We were there in late January. The breeding season runs from April to December, which meant we were firmly outside it. The airport was empty. Completely, absolutely, not-a-single-bird empty. Just flat, pale rock, a light breeze, and the particular silence of a place that is usually full of something and currently isn’t. It felt faintly like arriving at a famous restaurant on its day off.
Well — almost empty. Washington had the quiet satisfaction of a man who had planned this moment, and pointed upward. High above the island, riding the thermals with the kind of effortless, unhurried mastery that only becomes possible when you have a 2.4-metre wingspan and several million years of evolutionary refinement behind you, was a single albatross. Just the one. Turning slow, elegant circles against a sky that was an entirely unreasonable shade of blue. It had spent the winter months out at sea, apparently — because apparently the open ocean in January is preferable to staying on a perfectly good island in the Galápagos, which raises some questions about the ocean that I am not qualified to answer.
Washington also directed our attention to something on the ground nearby: an egg. Large, white, and sitting in a shallow, unlined depression in the rock — because albatrosses do not, it turns out, go in for elaborate nest construction. They lay one egg, directly on the ground, and between the two of them take turns sitting on it for the roughly two months it takes to hatch. The egg was substantially larger than I had expected. I stood there looking at it for a moment. There is no elegant way to describe what one thinks when confronted with an egg of that size, so I shall simply say that it gave one pause, and leave it at that. Good luck to the albatross concerned. I am very glad I am not one.
🐦 The Nazca Boobies — Clifftop Residents
From the airport — and I use the word loosely, as Española’s “airport” is essentially a strip of flattened lava with ambitions — the path continued out towards the windward edge of the island, where the ground simply stops bothering and drops away into the Pacific. These were not gentle, rolling cliffs you might find along the Dorset coast, the sort where you take a thermos and a slightly damp sandwich and feel adventurous. These were serious cliffs. Dramatic, wave-hammered, geologically imposing, and — I’ll admit — rather beautiful. The kind of cliffs that make you take a small, involuntary step backwards before you can stop yourself.
And perched on them, in various states of activity and apparent indifference to my presence, were the Nazca Boobies (Sula granti).
Now, the Nazca Booby has a mildly interesting bureaucratic history, which I shall inflict on you briefly. For most of the twentieth century, it wasn’t considered a species at all — merely a subspecies of the Masked Booby (Sula dactylatra), lumped in with its relatives and largely overlooked, like a middle child at a large Christmas gathering. It wasn’t until 2002 that taxonomists — people who spend their professional lives arguing about this sort of thing — formally recognised it as a distinct species in its own right. The name comes from the Nazca Plate, the tectonic plate on which the Galápagos archipelago sits, which itself was named after the Nazca region of southern Peru. So there’s a geological chain of naming that ends, pleasingly, with a large white seabird on a clifftop.
Physically, it’s a handsome bird. Largely white, with black wingtips, a distinctive mask of dark facial skin around the eyes, and an orange-yellow bill that looks as though it’s been professionally painted on. Compared to their famous blue-footed cousins — the ones that have become the unofficial mascot of every Galápagos postcard ever printed — the Nazca Booby is more conventionally elegant. Sleeker. More composed. They lack the comedy feet, which is a genuine loss from an entertainment standpoint, but they make up for it with a certain dignified bearing that suggests they know exactly what they’re doing and have done it for considerably longer than you’ve been alive.
Which is more or less true. Seabirds of this type have been nesting on these cliffs for a very long time indeed — long before Darwin arrived in September 1835 and started scribbling notes that would eventually overturn the prevailing understanding of life on Earth. The Galápagos had been known to Europeans since 1535, when the Bishop of Panama, Tomás de Berlanga, was blown off course on his way to Peru and stumbled upon them by accident, reporting back to King Charles I of Spain that he had found islands full of strange creatures and very little fresh water. Subsequent visitors — whalers, buccaneers, fur sealers — came and went over the centuries, variously exploiting and ignoring the wildlife. Through all of it, the Nazca Boobies sat on their clifftops and carried on doing exactly what they were doing now: nesting, preening, and staring into the middle distance with an expression of serene unconcern.
They nest in depressions scraped into the ground — no fussy construction, no elaborate architecture, just a shallow hollow in the clifftop soil, occasionally lined with a few bits of vegetation if the mood takes them. The wind coming off the ocean is, presumably, not something they’ve ever had to give a great deal of thought to, given they’ve been managing it for rather a long time.
What made the visit particularly worthwhile — more so than I’d anticipated, if I’m being honest — were the fledglings. At various points along the cliffs, we could see young birds at distinctly different stages of development, stretched out across what amounted to a live exhibit of growing up. Some were still mostly fluffy and grey, round and slightly baffled-looking, clearly at the stage where the world is large and confusing and food arrives if you make enough noise. Others were in that awkward intermediate phase — part fluff, part adult plumage — which gave them the appearance of having been assembled from two different birds by someone working under time pressure. And then there were those on the verge of independence, their white adult feathers mostly in place, practising the business of being a bird with varying degrees of success and conviction.
Watching young wildlife is, I think, universally wonderful, regardless of how jaded you might otherwise have become. Even the most seasoned naturalist — someone who has spent forty years in the field and seen everything twice — tends to go a bit soft when faced with a slightly bewildered juvenile Nazca Booby standing at the edge of a cliff, looking down at the Pacific with an expression that says, quite clearly, I was not informed about this part.
I’m not in the least bit ashamed to say I stood there longer than was strictly necessary.
There are places you visit and think, yes, that was good, glad I did that, and promptly move on with your life. And then there are places that stop you in your tracks and make you feel, temporarily at least, that the world is rather more astonishing than you usually remember between holidays. Punta Suárez, at the southern tip of Española, was firmly the second type. Walking among nesting birds that have never learned to fear you — because nothing in their evolutionary history has ever given them a reason to — watching a Galápagos Hawk hold itself completely motionless in the updraft as though suspended on invisible wire, standing at the edge of the Pacific while waved albatross eggs sat unattended on the bare ground in the wind, is the sort of experience that accumulates in layers. Each individual thing is remarkable on its own. Together, it becomes something quite difficult to put into words.
Which is inconvenient, given that I’m attempting to write it down.
We made our way back to the Zodiacs as the afternoon light went golden and long-shadowed, the kind of light that makes even a lava field look cinematic. We climbed back aboard the Guantanamera, changed out of clothes that had accumulated a fine coating of volcanic dust and general wildlife experience, and sat down to what was — once again — an unreasonably good dinner. I have no idea how the galley produces food of this quality on a small boat in the equatorial Pacific, and I’ve decided not to enquire too closely in case the answer ruins it.
We set sail into another evening at sea, the water dark and enormous around us. I was asleep before the sea lions had a chance to sneak up behind anyone.
🌋 Day 4 — Floreana Island: Turtles, Flamingos, and Green Sand
Sadly, this was our last full day in the Galápagos Islands, and if I’m honest, I was already beginning to feel the creeping melancholy of someone who knows the holiday is nearly over and has a long-haul flight home to look forward to. Wonderful.
We spent the day on Floreana Island, which is one of the older and more historically loaded islands in the archipelago, though you wouldn’t necessarily guess that from its quiet, unhurried appearance. Floreana, also known as Charles Island or Santa María, covers roughly 173 square kilometres and sits in the southern part of the Galápagos group. It was, rather remarkably, the first island in the entire archipelago to have a permanent human settlement, way back in 1832, when Ecuador had just claimed the islands the previous year. Charles Darwin himself stopped here during his famous voyage on HMS Beagle in 1835, so the island has got a bit of pedigree.
Floreana also has one of the more peculiar human histories in the islands. In the 1930s, a small cast of eccentric European characters — German settlers, philosophers, a self-styled “Empress” who wore metal dentures and went about the place with a whip — arrived and proceeded to behave in the sort of way that would make an excellent Netflix documentary. Several of them died under mysterious circumstances. It’s all very odd, and the details are murky even now, but the “Galápagos Affair,” as it became known, remains one of those stories that reminds you that remote islands tend to attract peculiar people. Present company included, presumably.
We came ashore on a beach that stopped us in our tracks almost immediately, because the sand had a distinctly greenish tinge to it. This wasn’t a trick of the light or some mild collective hallucination brought on by too much sun — the colour came from olivine crystals mixed into the sand. Olivine is a magnesium iron silicate mineral, and it forms in volcanic rock. As the island’s lava slowly breaks down over geological time, these small, glassy, yellowish-green crystals accumulate on the beach. It’s genuinely striking, even for those of us who are not normally the type to get excited about minerals.
It was only around eight in the morning, but the equatorial sun was already doing its level best to remind us that we were sitting right on the equator — zero degrees latitude, in case geography class was a long time ago — and that normal rules about comfortable temperatures don’t apply here. The Galápagos straddles the equator, and while the Humboldt Current keeps things cooler than you might expect, by mid-morning the sun had that particular quality of intent that makes you reach for the factor fifty.
We made our way up through the island’s interior, climbing steadily through the vegetation. Floreana’s highlands are surprisingly lush — the island rises to around 640 metres at its highest point, and the upper zones catch enough moisture to support greenery that feels quite different from the stark, volcanic lower terrain. Along the route we passed several lagoons, and here things got rather special. Scattered around the shallows were a handful of Galápagos flamingos, picking their way through the silt on long, improbable legs.
The flamingos here are the American flamingo, Phoenicopterus ruber, and they feed by wading through the shallow, briny water, filtering tiny shrimp, algae, and other small organisms through their distinctively bent bills. The pink colouring, as Washington — our naturalist guide, who had the patience of a saint and an encyclopaedic knowledge he deployed with great enthusiasm — explained, comes from the carotenoid pigments in the shrimp they eat. A flamingo on a poor diet goes rather pale and washed out. Something I can relate to after a British winter, frankly.
Floreana’s flamingo lagoons have been an important feeding and nesting site for decades, and the birds here are relatively undisturbed, which makes them wonderfully indifferent to gawping tourists standing on the path a few metres away.
We pressed on, reached the top, and came down the other side to a long, pale, sandy beach of the sort that travel brochures use and real life rarely delivers. This beach was — and this is where things took a turn for the mildly educational and the quietly absurd — a nesting site for Pacific green sea turtles, Chelonia mydas. Female turtles return to the same beaches where they were born to lay their own eggs, navigating hundreds or even thousands of kilometres of open ocean to do so. Scientists believe they use the Earth’s magnetic field as a kind of internal GPS. It’s an astonishing feat. My internal GPS, by contrast, struggles with the M25.
As it happened, we were also fortunate enough — and yes, I appreciate how this sounds — to witness a pair of turtles mating in the shallows. Now, sea turtle reproduction is not a quick affair. The male clings to the female’s shell and the whole business can go on for several hours. The female, for her part, has to keep coming up for air while supporting the weight of the male on top of her, which looks deeply inconvenient. Washington told us, with admirable composure, that females can store sperm from multiple males and use it to fertilise eggs over an extended period, which seems efficient if nothing else. He was full of this sort of information.
After a few minutes of standing there being educated about sea turtle mating habits — which is not, I’ll be honest, something I ever expected to have on my itinerary — we politely left them to it and moved on. Some things deserve privacy, even at the equator.
🌊 The Devil’s Crown, a Post Box on a Beach, and a Very Cold Cave
We made our way back to the Guantanamera as the equatorial sun started to really mean business. It was nudging towards midday and the deck was becoming the sort of place where you could fry an egg — and probably a tourist or two. But there was still one more snorkelling expedition to do, and apparently, the best had been saved until last. Our guide Washington said this with the quiet confidence of a man who knew something we didn’t. He was right.
The Devil’s Crown
The Devil’s Crown sits just off the southern tip of Floreana Island in the Galápagos archipelago, and it is, without question, one of the most extraordinary places I have ever stuck my face into the ocean. It is the eroded remnant of a volcanic caldera — essentially the collapsed top of a subsea volcano — that has been slowly claimed by the sea over thousands of years. The exposed rocky rim juts out of the water in jagged black peaks, looking for all the world like a broken crown, or possibly the set of a low-budget horror film. Either way, it had a certain dramatic quality.
The Galápagos Islands themselves are geologically young and restless. The archipelago sits atop a volcanic hotspot — a fixed plume of superheated mantle material — and the islands have been forming, eroding, and sinking back into the sea for millions of years. Española, the oldest island at around three to four million years, is already sinking. Fernandina, the youngest, is still actively volcanic. The Devil’s Crown fits neatly into this story of constant geological churn — a volcano that did its job, wore itself out, and is now slowly being reclaimed by the Pacific.
Our dinghy carried us out to the seaward side of the caldera, and we tipped ourselves into the water. Now, here is the thing about the equator that nobody quite prepares you for: the water is not warm. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that being bang on the equator — zero degrees latitude, the middle of the planet, the warmest place on Earth and all that — the sea would be positively tropical. It is not. The water around the Galápagos sits at around 72°F, which sounds acceptable until you actually get in it, at which point your body has a number of immediate and rather urgent opinions about the situation. The reason for the cool water is the Humboldt Current — a cold-water upwelling that sweeps north along the coast of South America and curls west around the islands. It’s the same current that makes the Galápagos so biologically extraordinary, bringing nutrients up from the deep ocean and supporting an astonishing food chain. Cold, yes. Worth it, absolutely.
Once the initial shock had subsided and I’d stopped making involuntary squeaking noises, we began to swim. The water outside the caldera was around thirty feet deep and the visibility was excellent — the sort of clarity that makes you feel you’re floating in the air rather than swimming in the sea. Below us, a procession of marine life went about its business with complete indifference to our presence. Large stingrays glided across the sandy bottom with that elegant, boneless grace they have, as though they’ve simply never encountered a reason to hurry. Schools of brightly coloured fish darted about in the middle distance. And then there were the sharks.
Black-tipped reef sharks are not, I am told, particularly dangerous to humans. They are slender, purposeful-looking creatures, perhaps four or five feet long, with neat black markings on the tips of their fins that give them a vaguely corporate appearance, like middle management in a suit. They were cruising around below us with a certain air of ownership that I found entirely reasonable. This is, after all, their ocean.
Emily, our daughter, had taken one look at the words “reef sharks” and made the entirely sensible decision to remain aboard the Guantanamera with her Nintendo. There is no shame in this. A lot of very intelligent people throughout history have chosen not to get into water containing sharks, and they have on the whole led perfectly satisfying lives. Emily was comfortable, dry, and progressing through her game at a reasonable pace.
The rest of us pressed on.
Inside the Caldera
Volcanic erosion over millennia had caused sections of the caldera wall to collapse, creating gaps wide enough to swim through — which meant we could enter what was once the actual interior of a volcano. This felt, frankly, like quite a thing to be doing on a Tuesday morning.
Inside, the character of the water changed completely. It became shallow — perhaps three to four feet in places — and astonishingly clear. The sea floor was carpeted in coral, and the variety of fish swimming amongst it was staggering. Parrotfish, angelfish, wrasse, triggerfish — colours so vivid they looked slightly unreal, like someone had turned the saturation up too far. It was one of those places that makes you feel briefly that the natural world has been showing off.
The starfish here were extraordinary — enormous flat creatures the size of dinner plates, in deep ochre and terracotta tones, sitting motionless on the coral. I did find myself thinking Emily would have loved them, as she has always had a soft spot for echinoderms, which is not a sentence I expected to write today but there we are.
Washington — our guide, a Galápagos-born naturalist who had the useful quality of being completely unruffled by anything the islands threw at us — located a small octopus tucked into a crevice in the coral. He reached in, coaxed it out with the practised ease of someone who has done this approximately one thousand times, and passed it among us to hold. An octopus in the hand is a genuinely peculiar sensation. It is soft and boneless and inquisitive, and its suckers explore your palm with something that feels worryingly like intelligence. It sat in my hand for a moment, apparently thinking things over, before Washington passed it along. By the time it had done the rounds of the group it had quite reasonably had enough of being handled by large mammals, and made its feelings known by releasing a small cloud of ink. Message received. Back it went.
It was, without any exaggeration, one of the most remarkable things I have seen underwater. Or indeed above water.
Post Office Bay and a Very Peculiar Postal System
We returned to the Guantanamera and made a gentle sail around to the other side of Floreana to Post Office Bay, arriving mid-afternoon. The bay is calm and sheltered, fringed with low scrub and pale sand, and looks — at first glance — entirely unremarkable. But a few dozen feet up from the beach, there is one of the more unusual institutions in the history of human communication.
Post Office Bay gets its name from a barrel. Originally, in the late eighteenth century, the bay was a regular stopping point for British and American whalers working the Pacific. Whaling voyages in this era could last three years or more — long, brutal affairs that took men thousands of miles from home with no reliable means of contact. In 1793, a British whaling captain named James Colnett — who had previously served under Captain Cook on his third Pacific voyage — is generally credited with establishing the tradition of leaving a wooden barrel on the beach as a makeshift postal system. Later accounts suggest it may have been in use even before Colnett formalised it, but he is the name most commonly attached to it.
The principle was simple and rather clever. A sailor would write a letter, address it, and leave it in the barrel. Any passing ship stopping at the bay would look through the barrel’s contents and take any letters addressed to ports along their planned route, delivering them by hand when they arrived. No stamps. No postmarks. No Royal Mail losing your parcel in a depot in Swindon. Just a collective act of trust between strangers at sea. Given that the postal infrastructure of the eighteenth-century Pacific was essentially non-existent, it worked remarkably well.
We went ashore and spent a cheerful half hour going through the barrel’s current contents — a rather battered wooden box, by this point — which was stuffed with postcards, envelopes, and letters from visitors from all over the world. The tradition continues today, though the correspondents are now tourists rather than whalers. The idea is the same: you look through what’s there, take anything addressed near where you’re going, and deliver it in person when you get home. We found a couple of cards addressed to destinations back home that we could reasonably manage.
I did briefly consider leaving a letter to myself, addressed to my house, just to see if anyone would bother. I decided against it.
The Lava Cave: Not Recommended for the Faint-Hearted
A short hike from the bay took us inland to a lava cave — which is, as the name suggests, a cave formed by volcanic action. Specifically, it forms when the outer surface of a lava flow cools and solidifies while molten lava continues to flow inside, eventually draining out and leaving a hollow tube. They are found all over the Galápagos, all over Hawaii, and in various other volcanically active parts of the world, and they come in all sizes.
This one was not enormous, but it was memorable. The entrance was a dark hole in the ground. The descent was by means of a wooden ladder of the sort that inspires absolutely no confidence whatsoever. It wobbled. It creaked. It had the general structural integrity of a suggestion. Once at the bottom, there was a rope — a rope — to cling onto as we picked our way over wet, uneven volcanic rock in the dark. We had been advised to bring torches. Some of us had remembered to do this. Others had not, and were sharing.
We are accustomed, at home, to show caves — places like the Cheddar Caves in Somerset or the Blue John Cavern in Derbyshire, where someone has gone to the considerable trouble of installing lighting, smooth pathways, handrails, and a gift shop. This was nothing like that. This was a cave that was under the entirely reasonable impression that it had not agreed to be a tourist attraction.
As we went deeper, the cave began to fill with water. Cool, dark, rather uninviting water. The sensible members of the group — a category I was beginning to feel I should have joined earlier — stopped at this point, stood on a ledge, and watched as the braver souls pressed on. The water became progressively deeper. Eventually it was deep enough that you had to swim. The water was cold. The darkness was substantial. There were things in the water that I preferred not to think about.
The cave ran out after a couple of hundred yards — which was both a relief and, in a perverse way, slightly disappointing. We splashed around for a few minutes in that sheepish way that people do when they’ve committed to something uncomfortable and are now looking for a dignified exit, and then turned back.
The return to the surface and the warm afternoon sunshine was one of the more gratifying moments of the trip. The equatorial sun, which had been an inconvenience only a few hours earlier, was now a dear and welcome friend.
We had one final swim in the sea — warm and calm and uncomplicated, with no sharks or cold water or rickety ladders — before washing off, climbing back aboard the Guantanamera, and setting sail once again.
🚢 Puerto Ayora – The Galápagos Comes with a Gift Shop
Our final destination was Santa Cruz Island, and specifically its main town, Puerto Ayora — which, if you’ve never heard of it, sits on the southern coast of the island and serves as the commercial and administrative hub of the entire Galápagos archipelago. It’s essentially the capital of somewhere that shouldn’t really have a capital, which is about as Ecuadorian a concept as you’re likely to encounter.
To get there, we had to cross the Itabaca Channel, which separates Santa Cruz from the smaller island of Baltra — where the airport sits, presumably because nobody wanted a runway anywhere near anything interesting. The crossing by boat takes roughly four hours, which is the sort of journey that would normally have me staring at my shoes and questioning my life choices. As it happened, we were saved from complete boredom by a rather spectacular turn of events: bottlenose dolphins appeared alongside the boat, leaping about with the sort of effortless cheerfulness that makes you feel slightly inadequate, and not long after, we spotted several manta rays gliding through the water beneath the surface. Extraordinary creatures. Completely silent. Doing nothing for tourism and not caring one bit about it.
We pulled into Puerto Ayora at around six in the evening. After dinner — which was perfectly acceptable, thank you for asking — we were ferried ashore to have a look around.
Now, I should explain something about the Galápagos Islands that tends to catch people off guard. Of the archipelago’s thirteen major islands and numerous smaller islets, only four are actually inhabited: Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal, Isabela, and Floreana. The human history of permanent settlement here is relatively recent — serious colonisation didn’t begin in earnest until Ecuador formally annexed the islands in 1832, and even then, early attempts at establishing communities were, to put it charitably, not going terribly well. Various agricultural colonies were attempted through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of which ended in rather grim fashion involving drought, disease, and the occasional mysterious disappearance — the Galápagos has a darkly peculiar history if you care to look it up.
Santa Cruz itself didn’t see significant permanent settlement until the early twentieth century, and Puerto Ayora — which takes its name from a former Ecuadorian president, as towns in South America invariably do — grew slowly from a small fishing community into what it is today. That being, by Galápagos standards, a fairly bustling place with a population of approximately 14,000 people. Which, I have to say, came as something of a surprise. I’m not entirely sure what I expected — perhaps a few weather-beaten fishermen and a man selling warm beer — but 14,000 is a proper town. There’s a hospital. There are schools. There’s a branch of the Charles Darwin Research Station, which has been operating there since 1964 and does genuinely important conservation work, particularly with the famous giant tortoises, several subspecies of which were driven to near-extinction before anyone thought to do something about it.
The waterfront area — the part we were taken to see — is almost entirely given over to the tourist trade, as you might expect given that several cruise boats and day-trip vessels arrive every single day of the year. There are restaurants lining the Avenida Charles Darwin (everyone gets named after Darwin around here; I imagine even the local takeaway has a Darwinian theme), bars of varying quality, and an almost unbroken succession of souvenir shops selling the full range of tortoise-related merchandise. Mugs, T-shirts, fridge magnets, small ceramic iguanas, large ceramic iguanas, and what appeared to be a stuffed blue-footed booby that I sincerely hope was not what it looked like.
It’s all perfectly pleasant and well-presented on the surface. Colourful, lively, and aimed squarely at people like us who have just stepped off a boat with their wallets open. But if you look even slightly past the painted shopfronts and the cheerful restaurant menus, it becomes fairly clear that life here isn’t exactly straightforward. Ecuador is not a wealthy country — its GDP per capita sits somewhere around $6,000 US dollars, and while the Galápagos generates significant tourism revenue, a good deal of that doesn’t filter down in the way you might hope. The islands themselves have strict entry requirements: to live and work here, you need to be an Ecuadorian national, and even then there are residency restrictions designed to limit the population and protect the ecosystem. Which means that the people who do live here are doing so within a fairly tightly regulated existence, in one of the most remote inhabited places on earth, surrounded by extraordinary natural beauty that they can’t fully exploit economically, and probably paying a fortune for anything that has to be shipped in — which is basically everything.
It’s a strange kind of paradise, when you think about it.
We didn’t linger enormously long. There is, if I’m being honest, only so much of a tourist waterfront you can absorb before you’ve essentially seen it, and Puerto Ayora delivers its full experience in a fairly compact timeframe. We had a wander, we had a look, someone bought a fridge magnet, and then we made our way back to the water taxi and returned to the Guantanamera, which by this point felt reassuringly like home — or at least like a home that moved gently up and down and smelled faintly of diesel.
🐢 Day 5 — Santa Cruz Island: Farewell to the Galápagos (and Hello to Some Very Old Reptiles)
Well, of course it rained.
I mean, naturally it did. It was our last day in the Galápagos Islands, and the weather — as if personally briefed on our departure schedule — had decided to mark the occasion with a low grey sky and that particular sort of damp that isn’t quite rain but gets you just as wet. The universe, it seems, has a flair for the dramatic farewell. Or possibly it just doesn’t like me.
We were docked off Santa Cruz Island, the most populated of the Galápagos archipelago and home to Puerto Ayora, the largest town in the islands — though “largest” is doing quite a lot of work there, given that the entire permanent population of Santa Cruz is somewhere around fifteen thousand souls. For context, that’s fewer people than you’d find in a moderately sized English market town on a wet Saturday. Which, come to think of it, this rather resembled.
The morning’s destination was the Charles Darwin Research Station, which has been operating on Santa Cruz since 1964. It was established by the Charles Darwin Foundation — itself founded in 1959, conveniently timed to coincide with the centenary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species — and has been the centrepiece of conservation efforts in the islands ever since. If you’ve come all this way to the Galápagos and you don’t visit the Darwin Station, I’m not entirely sure what you think you’ve been doing.
Before any of that, however, there was the small matter of luggage. We gathered our belongings together for what felt like the fortieth time on this trip — and I use the word “gathered” generously, because at this point my packing technique had deteriorated from “organised traveller” to “man who has given up and is just pushing things into a bag and hoping for the best.” Some of our fellow passengers were staying on for a further three days. Lucky blighters. They had the look of people who knew something we didn’t, which is probably because they did: three more days in one of the most extraordinary places on earth is infinitely better than heading home to a grey English autumn and a pile of post.
The rest of us were ferried ashore on the Zodiac inflatable boats that had become our primary mode of transport throughout the week, and handed over to a new local guide for the morning. Our week-long guide had bid us farewell back on the boat — cheerfully, I noticed, which I choose to interpret as professional courtesy rather than relief.
🔬 The Charles Darwin Research Station
The Darwin Research Station is not, it must be said, a glamorous facility. It’s a working scientific institution, not a theme park, and it looks rather like one — a collection of functional buildings, breeding enclosures, and educational signage spread across a scrubby patch of coastal land on the outskirts of Puerto Ayora. But what it lacks in architectural grandeur it more than compensates for in actual, genuine, world-historical importance.
The station’s primary mission has always been the conservation of the Galápagos ecosystem, with particular focus on the species most severely damaged by centuries of human interference. And few species had been damaged quite so thoroughly as the Galápagos giant tortoise.
🗺️ A Brief and Sobering History of the Tortoise’s Very Bad Few Centuries
The Galápagos giant tortoise (Chelonoidis spp., since you ask) had, by any reasonable measure, a rather dreadful time of it between the seventeenth century and the twentieth. When Spanish sailors first stumbled across the islands in 1535 — the archipelago was uninhabited at the time — they encountered tortoises in numbers that beggared belief. Estimates suggest that as many as 250,000 giant tortoises may have roamed the islands at that point. By the late twentieth century, that number had collapsed to somewhere around 15,000.
The problem, bluntly, was that giant tortoises are extraordinarily useful if you are a sailor who needs food and doesn’t want to bother with refrigeration. Tortoises can survive for up to a year without food or water — an almost miraculous biological adaptation that, unfortunately, made them the ideal living larder for passing ships. Whalers, buccaneers, and naval vessels hauled them aboard by the hundreds and stacked them in the hold, alive, where they would obligingly stay fresh until needed. It was efficient. It was practical. It was, from the tortoise’s perspective, absolutely catastrophic.
By the nineteenth century, whaling ships alone had removed an estimated hundred thousand tortoises from the islands. On top of that, the introduction of invasive species — rats, pigs, goats, cats, all brought by settlers — wreaked havoc on tortoise eggs and hatchlings. Goats, in particular, stripped the vegetation that tortoises depended on. It was a comprehensive disaster, and several subspecies didn’t survive it at all.
The tortoise populations that remained were in serious trouble by the time the Darwin Foundation was established. Captive breeding programmes began in earnest in the 1960s, and since then the results have been, cautiously, encouraging. More than six thousand tortoises have been bred at the station and released back into the wild across the various islands. It’s not a complete recovery — some subspecies are gone for ever — but it is, at least, a story that doesn’t end entirely in misery. Which, given the twentieth century’s general track record, counts as something of a triumph.
🐣 The Hatchlings: Small, Implausible, and Oddly Moving
Our first stop within the station was the hatchling enclosure, and I’ll admit that nothing quite prepares you for quite how small a baby giant tortoise is.
They were, some of them, only a few months old at this point — tiny, determined-looking creatures the size of a large walnut, picking their way across the enclosure floor with the focused intensity of something that has no idea it will eventually weigh two hundred and fifty kilograms. It was, frankly, difficult to take seriously. These minute animals, with their wrinkled necks and oversized-looking heads, will grow — given sufficient time and the absence of further human catastrophe — into the lumbering, prehistoric giants that were going to constitute the highlight of our morning.
They have plenty of time. Galápagos giant tortoises live, under good conditions, to somewhere between 150 and 200 years. The oldest reliably recorded individual, a tortoise named Jonathan on the island of St Helena (yes, the same one Napoleon was exiled to, which gives you a sense of the timeframes involved), was hatched around 1832 and was still alive as of last year. He was, to put it mildly, older than most countries.
Looking at these tiny hatchlings, still barely the size of my palm, it was quite something to reflect that the small creature currently blinking at me from behind a bit of shrubbery might reasonably be expected to outlive not just me, but my children, and probably my grandchildren as well. There’s a humbling thought for a Tuesday morning.
🔬 A Surprising Discovery: Not One Tortoise, But Eleven
One of the things I genuinely hadn’t expected — and in retrospect perhaps should have, given that this entire archipelago is essentially a masterclass in the mechanics of evolution — was the sheer variety of tortoise subspecies.
Each island in the Galápagos has its own distinct population of giant tortoise, shaped by millions of years of isolation and adaptation to local conditions. There are currently eleven recognised living subspecies, distributed across ten islands, each subtly (and in some cases not so subtly) different from the others. Three more subspecies are known to have existed but are now extinct.
The most visually striking difference is in the shape of the carapace — the shell, for those of us who didn’t pay sufficient attention in biology — and it corresponds directly to diet and environment. On islands where vegetation grows low to the ground, tortoises have developed a domed carapace that sits close to the neck, because there’s no particular advantage in being able to stretch upward. On islands where the available food is higher up — cacti and taller shrubs — the carapace has evolved into a distinctive saddle shape, with a pronounced upward flare at the front that allows the tortoise to extend its neck considerably higher. It is, in miniature, exactly the kind of elegant adaptive logic that made Darwin want to write a very long book.
The islands themselves were named, incidentally, for the tortoises. Galápago is an old Spanish word for tortoise — or more specifically for a particular kind of saddle, which the early explorers thought the saddle-backed tortoises resembled. So the islands are, in the most literal possible sense, named after a hat.
😔 Lonesome George: The Last of His Kind
From the hatchling area, we moved through to the adult enclosures, and it was here that we encountered perhaps the most famous tortoise in the world.
Lonesome George.
George was, at the time of our visit, the last known surviving Pinta Island tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdonii). He had been discovered on Pinta — the remote, northerly island in the archipelago — in 1971 by a Hungarian malacologist named József Vágvölgyi, at a point when the subspecies had been considered almost certainly extinct. Finding George alive was both wonderful news and, in a way, rather sad news, because he was alone. There were no other Pinta tortoises. There might never be again.
The Darwin Station had been trying to breed George for years, pairing him with female tortoises from closely related subspecies in the hope of preserving at least some of his genetic lineage. It hadn’t worked. Various females had been tried. Eggs had been laid on a couple of occasions, but none had proved viable. George appeared either uninterested or unsuccessful, depending on which researchers you asked, and probably both.
The Pinta Island tortoise subspecies, when George eventually went, would go with him.
He was estimated to be somewhere between 60 and 90 years old at this point — middle-aged, by tortoise standards, which is both impressive and slightly depressing to contemplate. He was declared the rarest living animal on earth, a designation that carries a certain grim distinction. He looked, if I’m honest, entirely unbothered by any of this. He was just sitting there, doing what tortoises do, which is mostly existing slowly and with great dignity.
George died on 24th June 2012, some years after our visit. The subspecies died with him. His preserved remains are now on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which feels simultaneously right and tremendously sad.
💪 Into the Enclosure: An Unexpectedly Moving Experience
After the quiet contemplation of George’s enclosure, we were taken into the section housing the adult males of other subspecies, and this — unexpectedly — turned out to be the moment of the morning.
Because they let us walk in with them.
Not in a zoo-behind-glass way. Actually in there, among them, with full-grown male Galápagos tortoises going about their business within arm’s reach. Within inches, in fact. These were animals weighing well over two hundred kilograms, their great domed shells reaching up to my waist, their ancient-looking heads moving with that slow, considered deliberateness that makes you feel as if they are genuinely thinking things through before committing to any course of action. They smelled faintly of earth and vegetation and something ancient that I couldn’t quite identify.
There are moments in travel where you find yourself suddenly very aware that you are somewhere extraordinary, doing something you will remember for the rest of your life. This was one of those moments. Standing in a dusty enclosure on a volcanic island in the Pacific, with a creature that had been alive since before the First World War ambling past at about three centimetres per minute, I felt — there’s no other word for it — genuinely moved.
The Galápagos does that to you, if you let it. Underneath all the logistics and the Zodiacs and the slightly damp final morning, there is something here that is genuinely irreplaceable. These islands, these animals, this peculiar corner of the world where evolution played out in plain sight — it’s worth every grey cloud and every repacked suitcase.
Even for a whingeing Englishman in his sixties who had been to eleven countries and thought he’d seen it all.
Clearly, I hadn’t.
Planning your visit to the Galápagos Islands
🌍 Location
The Galápagos Islands are an archipelago situated in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 1,000 kilometres off the western coast of Ecuador, in South America. The islands straddle the equator and form a province of Ecuador. The archipelago comprises 13 major islands, six smaller isles, and numerous rocky islets, spread across an area of roughly 45,000 square kilometres of ocean. Only four islands — Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal, Isabela, and Floreana — are permanently inhabited by people. The capital of the Galápagos province is Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, located on San Cristóbal Island. Santa Cruz is the most populous island, with its main town of Puerto Ayora serving as the principal hub for tourists.
The islands were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978 and are famed worldwide as the place that inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, following his visit in 1835. Today, 97% of the land area falls within the boundaries of the Galápagos National Park, making this one of the most strictly protected natural environments on the planet.
✈️ Getting There
There is no way to reach the Galápagos Islands by road. All visitors must first travel to mainland Ecuador, arriving at one of two major international airports: Mariscal Sucre International Airport in Quito, or José Joaquín de Olmedo International Airport in Guayaquil. UK visitors do not currently require a visa for stays in Ecuador of up to 90 days, though it is always advisable to verify entry requirements with the Ecuadorian consulate before travelling. Your passport must be valid for at least six months beyond your planned departure date from Ecuador.
From mainland Ecuador, all flights to the Galápagos depart from either Quito or Guayaquil. The two main airports in the archipelago are Seymour Airport on Baltra Island (airport code: GPS), which sits just north of Santa Cruz, and San Cristóbal Airport (airport code: SCY) on San Cristóbal Island. A third airport on Isabela Island handles only small inter-island flights. The flight from Guayaquil takes roughly two hours; flights from Quito generally stop in Guayaquil and take around three and a half hours in total. The principal airlines serving these routes are LATAM and Avianca. It is sensible to plan at least one overnight stay on the mainland before your onward flight to the islands, as international delays could otherwise cause you to miss your domestic connection.
Before boarding your domestic flight, you must complete several administrative steps. The first is the Transit Control Card (TCT), a mandatory immigration document for all visitors. Since May 2025, the TCT must be completed online in advance via the official government platform; once registered and paid, you will need to present it — either printed or on your phone — at the CGREG counter at Quito or Guayaquil airport. The TCT costs US$20 per person. Additionally, you must complete an online Biosafety Sworn Declaration form within 48 hours of your flight, confirming you are not carrying prohibited items such as seeds, plants, or animal products. Your bags will then be physically inspected by the Galápagos Biosecurity Agency (ABG) before you can check in. On arrival at the islands, you must pay the Galápagos National Park entrance fee, which stands at US$200 per adult and US$100 per child, payable in cash only. It is important to carry sufficient US dollars in cash to cover these costs, as card payments are not guaranteed everywhere.
It is strongly recommended that you book your flights to the islands only once you have confirmed your cruise or hotel arrangements, as most operators require you to use specific flight schedules that align with their programmes.
🚢 Getting Around
Once in the archipelago, getting around is primarily done by boat. Visitors on a cruise — the most popular way to explore — travel between islands overnight on their vessel, waking up at each new destination. Cruises range from four to twelve or more nights and can accommodate groups ranging from a handful of passengers on intimate yachts up to over a hundred on larger expedition ships.
Independent travellers who prefer to stay in hotels on shore use inter-island ferries to move between the main inhabited islands. These ferries, known locally as lanchas or fibras, operate between Santa Cruz (departing from Puerto Ayora), San Cristóbal (Puerto Baquerizo Moreno), and Isabela (Puerto Villamil), typically once or twice daily. Private speedboat transfers are also available at a higher cost. Bear in mind that these vessels are small and open to the elements, so those prone to seasickness would do well to come prepared. Note that luggage is also inspected when travelling between islands, to prevent the accidental movement of seeds or organic material from one island to another.
There are also limited small propeller-plane flights operating between select islands for those who wish to avoid the water.
On the islands themselves, the main towns are navigable on foot, and taxis — including shared white pick-up trucks — are readily available. Bicycles can be hired from local hotels and shops, and some areas are well suited to cycling. Water taxis are used to reach certain piers and boats that anchor offshore. Visitors exploring any site within the National Park must be accompanied by a certified naturalist guide at all times; this is a legal requirement and applies to the vast majority of visitor sites across the archipelago.
⚠️ Things to Be Aware Of
Conservation laws and park rules
The Galápagos National Park enforces a strict code of conduct that all visitors are legally obliged to follow. You must remain on marked trails at all visitor sites and must always keep at least two metres away from wildlife, even if the animals approach you first — which they frequently do, as the wildlife here has no instinctive fear of humans. You must never feed any animal, touch any creature, or disturb nesting sites. Flash photography is prohibited around wildlife, and drones are not permitted anywhere in the islands. Commercial photography and videography must be approved in advance by the Galápagos National Park Directorate.
It is illegal to remove anything from the natural environment — this includes shells, rocks, lava, sand, coral, flowers, native wood, and any animal parts. Purchasing souvenirs made from any of these materials is equally prohibited. Campfires are banned everywhere on the islands, and smoking and drinking alcohol are strictly forbidden within the National Park; these activities are only permitted in designated urban areas such as bars and restaurants. Camping is allowed only in a small number of authorised spots, and permission must be sought from the National Park offices at least 48 hours in advance.
Motorised water sports, jet skis, submersibles, and aerial tourist activities are all prohibited within the National Park and Marine Reserve. Fishing is only permitted on authorised vessels, with a licensed guide, and is restricted to catch-and-release activities for most species.
Biosecurity
The islands’ extraordinary biodiversity has been hard-won, and biosecurity is taken extremely seriously. You must not bring any live animals, plants, seeds, or fresh food into the archipelago, even unintentionally. Check your shoes and luggage carefully before travelling, as seeds and soil can be carried unwittingly. The same precautions apply when moving between islands — further inspections take place at each inter-island departure point.
Currency and practicalities
Ecuador uses the US dollar as its currency. ATMs exist in the main towns but can be unreliable or limited, particularly on less-visited islands such as Isabela and Floreana. It is advisable to bring a reasonable supply of US dollars in cash before leaving the mainland, covering park entry fees and day-to-day expenses. Medical facilities exist in Puerto Ayora and Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, but are limited in scope; anyone with a serious condition will be transferred to mainland Ecuador for treatment. Comprehensive travel insurance, including medical evacuation cover, is strongly recommended.
Culture and local life
The permanent population of the islands lives predominantly in the four inhabited towns and has a close relationship with both tourism and conservation. Locals, known as Galápagueños, are generally welcoming to visitors, and Spanish is the official language. English is spoken in many tourist-facing businesses but cannot be assumed elsewhere. Tipping is customary in Ecuador, and it is considered good practice to tip guides and boat crews who provide a high standard of service.
The legal drinking age in Ecuador and the Galápagos is 18. Visitors are expected to dress modestly when away from beaches and to show respect for the environment at all times. The guiding philosophy across the islands is leave no trace — you are asked to ensure that wherever you visit, you leave it exactly as you found it.
Best time to visit the Galápagos
🌤️ Overview of Seasons
The Galápagos Islands straddle the equator, so they don’t follow typical tropical seasons. Instead, the archipelago has two main seasons shaped by ocean currents — the warm, wet season and the cool, dry season — with distinct wildlife and weather patterns in each.
☀️ Warm Season: December to May
The warm season brings calm, clear waters and air temperatures rising to around 30°C. This is driven by the Panama Current, which warms the seas surrounding the islands. Rainfall is intermittent but can be heavy, particularly in January and February. The sun is intense and skies can be hazy.
Wildlife is exceptionally active during this period. Sea turtles nest on beaches, marine iguanas display vivid red and green mating colours, and land and marine birds are in full breeding plumage. The calm seas make this the best season for snorkelling and diving, with excellent visibility. Green sea turtles are commonly spotted underwater, and whale sharks appear around Darwin and Wolf Islands from June onwards (though their season peaks slightly into the cool season).
What to pack: Lightweight, breathable clothing, a light waterproof layer, high-factor sunscreen (SPF 50+), a wide-brimmed hat, a rash vest for snorkelling, reef-safe sunscreen, and insect repellent for inland walks.
🌥️ Cool Season: June to November
The cool season is driven by the Humboldt Current sweeping up from Antarctica, bringing nutrient-rich, cooler waters. Air temperatures drop to around 18–22°C, and a mist known locally as garúa often blankets the highlands. The sea is rougher and choppier, and the skies are frequently overcast.
Despite the gloomier atmosphere, this is arguably the richest season for wildlife watching. The cool, nutrient-dense waters bring an explosion of marine life — penguin and sea lion activity peaks, blue-footed boobies perform their famous mating dances, and albatrosses are present on Española Island from April through December. Whale sharks are regularly spotted around the northern islands. Underwater conditions can be choppier, but the marine biodiversity is unmatched.
What to pack: A light fleece or mid-layer for evenings and highland hikes, a waterproof jacket, long-sleeved UV-protective tops, sturdy walking shoes for volcanic terrain, anti-seasickness tablets, a dry bag for boat excursions, and a wetsuit or wetsuit hire is advisable for snorkelling.
🐢 Transition Months
May to June and November to December are transitional periods where conditions from both seasons overlap. These months offer a pleasing mix of warm temperatures, calmer seas, and active wildlife — often at lower visitor numbers than peak periods. They represent some of the best-value months to visit.
Summary Chart
| Month | Season | Temp | Wildlife & highlights |
|---|---|---|---|
| December | Warm | 26–30°C | Sea turtle nesting begins; calm, clear seas ideal for snorkelling |
| January | Warm | 27–30°C | Marine iguana mating colours; sea turtle nesting at its peak |
| February | Warm | 27–30°C | Flamingo chicks hatch; land bird breeding season peaks |
| March | Warm | 26–29°C | Waved albatross arrives on Española; frigate birds nesting |
| April | Warm | 25–28°C | Giant tortoise hatching; blue-footed booby courtship begins |
| May | Transition | 23–26°C | Seas still calm; wildlife breeding across species; quieter visitor numbers |
| June | Transition | 20–24°C | Sea lion pups born; whale sharks appear at Darwin & Wolf Islands |
| July | Cool | 18–22°C | Blue-footed boobies dancing; Galápagos penguins highly active |
| August | Cool | 17–21°C | Peak marine diversity; fur seals haul out; whale sharks abundant |
| September | Cool | 18–21°C | Albatross fledglings depart; sea lion colonies at their busiest |
| October | Cool | 19–22°C | Humpback whale sightings; green sea turtle courtship begins |
| November | Transition | 21–25°C | Seas calm again; excellent mix of marine and land wildlife |
Temperatures are approximate average air temperatures. Sea temperatures run 2–4°C cooler during the cool season
🌍 Overall Best Time to Visit
The Galápagos Islands reward visitors year-round, but if you can only go once, the transition months of May–June and November offer the most satisfying experience. The seas are still manageable, the weather is pleasant, the wildlife is exceptionally varied — with both warm-season nesters and cool-season feeders active simultaneously — and visitor numbers are lower than the busiest holiday periods. That said, if diving and snorkelling are your priority, the warm season (December to April) delivers the calmest, clearest waters. If you are most excited by dramatic wildlife spectacles — whale sharks, penguin colonies, and the famous blue-footed booby dances — plan your trip between July and September. There is, in truth, no bad time to visit the Galápagos; the archipelago’s extraordinary endemic wildlife ensures that every month brings something remarkable.