Today we landed on civilization; this is the largest of the Galápagos towns, called Puerto Ayora. The name of the island is Santa Cruz, and on this island we also have the headquarters of the Galápagos National Park Service and the Charles Darwin Research Station working on interesting sustainable projects.
During the morning we visited the Charles Darwin Research Station. Here we learned about the conservation programs carried out by the Galápagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Research Station. There are more than seven hundred tortoises as part of the captive breeding program, some of them are adults, some are babies and others are young individuals. All of these projects have the objective to restore the dynasty of the giant reptiles of the Galápagos after their populations have been devastated by introduced animals and human impact. Some characters of the station were seen today, like Super Diego, a male tortoise brought from the San Diego Zoo in California. This is the male who helped save the species from Espanola Island and now many babies are reproducing naturally in this place!
The tourist industry is the main source of income in this economy. Here, we have schools, high schools and universities for the education of the local people. Puerto Ayora is a nice, clean town and it was part of our experience as we visited this island and spent some time exploring the shops and art galleries.
We explored the highlands in the afternoon. The Galápagos giant tortoises are distributed across a large part of the rain forest on Santa Cruz. There is a population of more than five thousand individuals on this island only. Today we spotted a lot of them, both females and many large males. We also got a chance to see a short eared owl fly along the trail and the opportunity to explore along an underground expedition by hiking into a lava tube. It was raining for a small portion of the afternoon, but that didn’t stop us from exploring the area.
We got to see how green the islands can be and how interesting it was to walk around the humid zone and the natural habitat of the giants from the Galápagos.
