Galápagos Islands

The Galápagos are thirteen volcanic islands a thousand kilometres off Ecuador where the animals never learned to fear people — sea lions sleep on the benches, iguanas cross the paths, boobies court at your feet — and where a young naturalist named Darwin, in five weeks of 1835, gathered the finches and tortoises that would rewrite how life is understood. The islands sit on the line of the world at the meeting of three currents, so penguins live beside flamingos, and a species can differ from one island to the next; the national park, drawn in 1959, covers almost all of the land and its sea.

The traveller lands at Baltra or San Cristóbal and chooses between a live-aboard cruise, which reaches the far islands, and hopping between the three inhabited ones — Santa Cruz for Puerto Ayora, the Darwin Station and the tortoises of the highlands; Isabela for the Sierra Negra caldera and the snorkelling of Los Túneles; San Cristóbal for the sea lions on the malecón and León Dormido — and in either case snorkels daily with turtles, rays, sharks and sea lions that come to look, and walks with a naturalist guide wherever the park requires one, which is almost everywhere.

The Guide's register of care: the park's rules are the reason the islands still work — two metres from every animal, nothing touched or fed, no flash, feet on the marked trail, a licensed guide at every visitor site —; the entry fee is high and rose in 2024, and it pays for exactly this; the garúa season brings cool water and rougher crossings but the richest sea, the warm season brings calm and rain; motion-sickness tablets are wisdom, not weakness; and whatever the price of a trip here, it is cheaper than the islands' loss.