Academy Bay, Santa Cruz Island
The last couple of days of our expedition through the famed Galápagos Archipelago offered a fascinating look into the past and present of these once-remote islands.
On Fernandina Island we saw how it all began: a towering shield volcano having breached the surface of the Pacific Ocean, its flanks covered in sterile black lava flows that gradually became colonized by the heartiest of organisms – Fernandina is one of the largest completely pristine areas left on planet Earth.
An overnight navigation of just 125 nautical miles brought us to an entirely different and more modern vision of Galápagos: Santa Cruz Island. This is the second largest island of the group, but being much older has been colonized by more organisms, the volcanic landscapes being carpeted by a dense cover of vegetation that ranges from coastal and arid zone vegetation in the lowlands, to surprising cloud forests in the highlands. These conditions harbor a great many more species of birds and animals, but also made the land suitable for colonization by the greatest enemy of oceanic archipelagos – mankind. The unique nature of these remote islands depends entirely on their isolation from the rest of the world, and once this is breached, oceanic islands are generally doomed.
Early settlers started to reach Galápagos in the 19th and early 20th centuries, choosing Santa Cruz, San Cristobal, Floreana and Isabela as the islands that offered the greater chances of success. Initial colonisation was unwilling, being the result of Ecuadorian penal colonies established after 1832 when the Galápagos became part of Ecuador. Later on, strange European eccentrics and Ecuadorian nationals, seeking a life away from the prying eyes of the mainland, started to arrive and eke out a very tough living consisting mainly of fishing and some cattle ranching and agriculture in the highlands. The arrival of mankind also heralded the advent of an army of invasive organisms that threatens the fragile ecosystems that took so many millions of years to establish themselves naturally.
The flora and fauna of the Galápagos, particularly the vulnerable giant tortoises, rapidly started to go the way of the vanished biota of all other tropical oceanic islands groups – but all was not lost. In 1957, an official scientific expedition led to the islands by UNESCO prompted the Ecuadorian government to take vital and timely steps towards the conservation of the archipelago: it declared the islands a National Park in 1959 and invited the establishment of an international research station on one of the islands. The location for the Charles Darwin Research Station was chosen: Academy Bay on southern Santa Cruz, named after an earlier scientific expedition led in 1906 by the California Academy of Science, and it was finally up and running in 1964. Over forty years later, the excellent work undertaken by this institution is evident in the excellent condition of all the islands we have explored, that feel as pristine as they must have been when Darwin himself visited in 1835.
We spent the morning visiting one of the longest-term and most successful conservation projects run by CDRS: the captive breeding and release program of those most emblematic of Galápagos species, the giant tortoises. We were then lucky enough to also get to see this majestic animal in its natural habitat, in the highlands of Santa Cruz.
