Galapagos

The Galápagos Island archipelago, located 1090km from Ecuador´s Pacific coastal city of Guayaquil. This remote island group has its origins from a series of seafloor volcanic upthrusts, creating lava peaks that emerged above the Pacific ocean surface and cooled, becoming almost `out of this world` weird landscapes, cactus forests, lush green highlands, turquoise coves and perfect tropical beaches. Over an immense amount of evolutionary time, the archipelago slowly evolved into a biodiverse untouched sanctuary for an all-star cast of plants, sea birds, reptiles, mammals, marine species and insects.

Sometime in the 1800s, swashbuckling pirates and intrepid explorers found the Galápagos Islands. One of the now most famous early visitors was Charles Darwin, who came on HMS Beagle as a budding young naturalist to spend 19 days studying the islands' flora and fauna in 1835. On his return to England in 1859, Darwin published a chronical titled `On the Origin of Species`, which introduced his theory of evolution — spotlighting his extraordinary findings on the Galápagos Islands, showcasing them to the world. By the 1870s, the Royal Society and scientific community had accepted Darwin's evolutionary theory as a fact. However, many still favoured competing explanations, therefore it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed, in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.

The Galapagos are a protectorate of Ecuador which in 1959, created Galapagos as the nation's first National Park. That was followed in 1978, when UNESCO named the Galapagos as a World Heritage site. Accessing the Galapagos Islands in most all cases requires flying, boarding the aircraft either in Quito, or Guayaquil, as all flights that operate out of Quito go through Guayaquil, to either Baltra, or San Cristobal airports.