It's quite humbling that thirteen scarred volcanic islands, flung across 45,000 square kilometres of ocean, 960km adrift from the Ecuadorian mainland and defying permanent human colonization until the twentieth century, should have been so instrumental in changing humanity's perception of itself. Yet, once feared as a bewitched and waterless hell, then the haunt of pirates, and later still an inhospitable pitstop for whaling ships, it was the forbidding Galápagos Islands that spurred Charles Darwin to formulate his theory of evolution by natural selection, catapulting science into the modern era and colouring the values and attitudes of the Western world ever since. Three years before Darwin's arrival in 1835, Ecuador had claimed sovereignty over the islands, which swiftly took root in the country's consciousness, not as the forsaken land of unearthly creatures and lava wastes that the rest of the world saw, but as a source of great national pride, bolstered still further by Darwin's discoveries. When the islands became desirable to foreign powers as a strategic military base from which to protect the entrance to the Panama Canal, the Ecuadorian government - even after a string of unsuccessful colonization attempts - resisted several enticing offers for territorial rights over them. In fact, it wasn't until World War II, when it became clear that just such a strategic base was necessary, that the US was allowed to establish an airforce base on Baltra. When the war ended, the base was returned to Ecuador and became the principal point of access to the islands for a steadily increasing flow of immigrants and tourists.

 

Today, the Galápagos Islands' matchless wildlife and natural history pulls in around 65,000 tourists a year to the archipelago - most of which can only be seen on expensive boat tours - financing what is now Ecuador's best-off province. Its population of 16,000 live in just eight main settlements on the four inhabited islands. In the centre of them all lies Santa Cruz , site of Puerto Ayora , the islands' most developed town and serviced by the airstrip on Baltra, where the majority of tourists begin a visit to the islands. San Cristóbal , to the east, holds the provincial capital, Puerto Baquerizo Moreno , and while this is less developed than Puerto Ayora, it does possess the archipelago's other major runway and is nurturing a reputation as a surfing centre. Straddling the equator to the west of Santa Cruz is the largest and most volcanically active of all the islands, Isabela , whose main settlement, the tiny Puerto Villamil keeps the archipelago's only other airport. To the south of Santa Cruz, Floreana , with its population of about eighty people, has very little by way of infrastructure but does have a bizarre history of settlement, while Santiago , northwest of Santa Cruz, once colonized but finally abandoned in the twentieth century, is visited for its wildlife and lava formations.

The settled sites, however, represent a mere three percent of the total land area of the archipelago. In response to the damage caused to flora and fauna populations by centuries of human interference, the rest of it - almost 7000 square kilometres - has been protected as a national park since 1959, with tourists restricted to the colonized areas and around fifty designated visitor sites spread across the archipelago. Most of them are reached by tour boats only, or far less comprehensively by day-trips from the colonized areas, and visitors must be accompanied by a licensed guide to see them. Despite the restrictions, each site has been chosen to show off the full diversity of the islands, and in a typical tour you'll be encountering different species of flora and fauna everyday, many of them endemic (not found anywhere else on the planet). It's worth noting, however, that while sites close to Santa Cruz tend to be the more crowded, several of the most unusual ones are in remoter places: Española, for example, is known for its waved albatrosses, while the flightless cormorant is only found on the coasts of Isabela and Fernandina . Bird-watchers are also bound to want to see the large seabird colonies on the remote Genovesa .

It was also in 1959, the centenary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species , that another means of Galápagos conservation was instituted, with the creation of the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF), which set about building the Charles Darwin Research Station (CDRS) in Puerto Ayora, whose vital work includes boosting the threatened populations of unique Galápagos species. In 1979, the archipelago was one of the first places to be made a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, who then, six years later, declared it a World Biosphere Reserve. Its position was further strengthened in 1986 with the creation of the Reserva Marina de Galápagos , recently extended to protect 130,000 square kilometres within a 40-nautical-mile radius around the island, and now the second largest marine reserve in the world after the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. It's largely thanks to the huge conservation effort that the tourists that flock to the islands each year are privy to such incomparable experiences as swimming with hammerhead sharks and turtles, and walking beside the nests of frigate birds and boobies as unique species of finches hop onto their shoes. The animals that have carved out an existence on the dramatic volcanic landscape conjure up visions of life completely divorced of human presence, and their legendary fearlessness only intensifies the otherworldliness of these extraordinary islands.