Charles Island, or Santa Maria in Spanish, is a rather special island in many ways. It holds the largest degree of endemism in the archipelago, meaning that many of the animals and plants on this island occur nowhere else. This was the first island to be inhabited in the Galapagos, and one of the four visited by Charles Darwin during his famous Voyage of the Beagle.
The beauty of this island is only matched only by the rich human history, since many pirates, buccaneers, privateers and whalers stopped by throughout the years to collect water and giant tortoises, and strange and eccentric Europeans settled here in the 1930s.
