Galápagos Archipelago

 Galápagos   Archipelago

Galápagos Islands

Topographic and bathymetric map of the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador.

 

 

The Galápagos Islands (Spanish: Islas Galápagos) are an archipelago of volcanic islands in the Eastern Pacific, located around the Equator 900 km (560 mi) west of South America. They form the Galápagos Province of the Republic of Ecuador, with a population of slightly over 33,000 (2020). The province is divided into the cantons of San Cristóbal, Santa Cruz, and Isabela, the three most populated islands in the chain.

 

The Galápagos are famous for their large number of endemic species, which were studied by Charles Darwin in the 1830s and inspired his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. All of these islands are protected as part of Ecuador's Galápagos National Park and Marine Reserve.

 

Thus far, there is no firm evidence that Polynesians or the indigenous peoples of South America reached the islands before their accidental discovery by Bishop Tomás de Berlanga in 1535. If some visitors did arrive, poor access to fresh water on the islands seems to have limited settlement.

 

The Spanish Empire similarly ignored the islands, although during the Golden Age of Piracy various pirates used the Galápagos as a base for raiding Spanish shipping along the Peruvian coast. The goats and black and brown rats introduced during this period greatly damaged the existing ecosystems of several islands.

 

English sailors were chiefly responsible for exploring and mapping the area. Darwin's voyage on HMS Beagle was part of an extensive British survey of the coasts of South America. Ecuador, which won its independence from Spain in 1822 and left Gran Colombia in 1830, formally occupied and claimed the islands on 12 February 1832 while the voyage was ongoing.  José de Villamil, the founder of the Ecuadorian Navy, led the push to colonize and settle the islands, gradually supplanting the English names of the major islands with Spanish ones.

 

The United States built the islands' first airport as a base to protect the western approaches of the Panama Canal in the 1930s. After World War II, its facilities were transferred to Ecuador. With the growing importance of ecotourism to the local economy, the airport modernized in the 2010s, using recycled materials for any expansion and shifting entirely to renewable energy sources to handle its roughly 300,000 visitors each year.

 

Galápagos sea lion (Zalophus wollebaeki) in Punta Pitt, San Cristóbal Island, Galápagos Islands, Ecuador.

 

Names

The Galápagos or Galapagos Islands are named for their giant tortoises,[2] which were more plentiful at the time of their discovery. The Spanish word galápago derives from a pre-Roman Iberian word meaning "turtle", the meaning it still has in most dialects. Within Ecuadorian Spanish, however, it is now also used to describe the islands' large tortoises.

 

Physical geography

Orthographic projection centered over the GalápagosAn animated tour of the GalápagosNASA oceanographer Gene Carl Feldman reflecting on the islands

 

The islands are located in the eastern Pacific Ocean, 973 km (605 mi) off the west coast of South America. The majority of islands are also more broadly part of the South Pacific. The closest land mass is that of mainland Ecuador, the country to which they belong, 926 km (500 nmi) to the east.

 

Ecology

 

Pinnacle Rock on Bartolomé Island, with Santiago in the background and a ferry on the right for scale

Terrestrial

Main article: Galápagos Islands xeric scrub

Most of the Galápagos is covered in semi-desert vegetation, including shrublands, grasslands, and dry forest. A few of the islands have high-elevation areas with cooler temperatures and higher rainfall, which are home to humid-climate forests and shrublands, and montane grasslands (pampas) at the highest elevations. There are about 500 species of native vascular plants on the islands, including 90 species of ferns. About 180 vascular plant species are endemic.

The islands are well known for their distinctive endemic species, including giant tortoises, finches, flightless cormorants, Galápagos lava lizards and marine iguanas, which evolved to adapt to islands' environments.

 

A Galápagos tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra) on Santa Cruz. C. nigra is the largest living species of tortoise, hunted to near extinction during the islands' whaling era.

 

 

Ecuador won its independence from Spain in 1822 and left Gran Colombia in 1830. Gen. José de Villamil, the founder of the Ecuadorian Navy, led the push to colonize and settle the islands before Ecuador's neighbors or the European empires could occupy them. He formed the Galapagos Settlement Company in mid-1831[49] and, with President Juan José Flores's support, sent Col. Ignacio Hernández with a dozen craftsmen to begin the settlement on Charles Island—renamed "Floriana" in the president's honour—early the next year.

 

The second voyage of HMS Beagle under captain Robert FitzRoy was undertaken to better survey the coasts and harbours of South America for the British Navy's Hydrographic Department. It reached the Galápagos on 15 September 1835 and—while surveying its islands, channels, and bays—the captain and others on the crew observed the geology, plants, and wildlife on Floreana, Isabela, and Santiago before continuing on their round-the-world expedition on October 20. The young naturalist Charles Darwin, primarily a geologist at the time, was struck by the many volcanic features they saw, later referring to the archipelago as "that land of craters".

 

Galápagos National Park was established in 1959,  with tourism starting to expand in the 1960s, imposing several restrictions upon the human population already living on the island. However, opportunities in the tourism, fishing, and farming industries attracted a mass of poor fishermen and farmers from mainland Ecuador. In the 1990s and 2000s, violent confrontations between parts of the local population and the Galápagos National Park Service occurred, including capturing and killing giant tortoises and holding staff of the Galápagos National Park Service hostage to obtain higher annual sea cucumber quotas.

 

Politics

 

The islands are administered as Ecuador's Galápagos Province, established by presidential decree on 18 February 1973 during the administration of Guillermo Rodríguez Lara. The province is divided into three cantons, each covering groups of islands. The capital is Puerto Baquerizo Moreno.

 

Demographics

The largest ethnic group is composed of Ecuadorian Mestizos, the mixed descendants of Spanish colonists and indigenous Native Americans, who arrived mainly in the last century from the continental part of Ecuador. Some descendants of the early European and American colonists on the islands also still remain on the islands.

 

In 1959, approximately 1,000 to 2,000 people called the islands their home. In 1972 a census in the archipelago recorded a population of 3,488. By the 1980s, this number had risen to more than 15,000 people, and in 2010 there were 25,124 people in the Galápagos. 2021 projected population was 40,685.

 

Five of the islands are inhabited: Baltra, Floreana, Isabela, San Cristóbal, and Santa Cruz.

 

Environmental protection policy

In 2007, UNESCO put the Galápagos Islands on their List of World Heritage in Danger because of threats posed by invasive species, unbridled tourism and overfishing.  On 29 July 2010, the World Heritage Committee decided to remove the Galápagos Islands from the list because the Committee found significant progress had been made by Ecuador in addressing these problems.

Brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis), Tortuga Bay

Marine iguana

Blue-footed booby

 

Galápagos tortoise on Santa Cruz Island

Galápagos dove on Española Island

 

Waved albatrosses on Española

Galápagos penguin on Bartolomé Island

 

Bottlenose dolphins jumping offshore of the islands

 

Grapsus grapsus on the rocks

 

School of scalloped hammerheads off Wolf Island