As my plane descended over the Galapagos Islands and its intense blue waters, a flight attendant sprayed the overhead baggage compartments with insecticide. When I landed, I stepped onto an astroturf carpet saturated with pesticide to kill off any foreign organisms on the soles of my shoes. 

I’ve traveled all over the world, but I’d never seen anything like this. It was an introduction to the many ways the stewards of these islands protect them, and my first clue to how precious the wonders for which they do it really are. 

Like most tourists, I had come to this archipelago more than 600 miles off mainland Ecuador to see birds and other species that exist nowhere else on Earth — the same place where Charles Darwin developed his groundbreaking evolutionary theories and where scientists continue to study the process of natural selection.

And as excited as I was to get close to its famed giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies, I also wondered how the Galapagos National Park, which encompasses 97% of the islands, manages to protect its unique species and environment from tourists like me. 

The archipelago’s extreme isolation, together with its unique confluence of tropical and cold-water ocean currents and a harsh desert-like environment, have “led to the development of unusual animal life” and make it “a living museum” of evolution, in the words of UNESCO, which declared the islands a World Heritage Site in 1978. It’s why the islands can support penguins, who survive on the cool water from the Antarctic, and also tropical fish. It probably explains why the finches discovered by Charles Darwin continue to evolve to survive in their difficult environment. 

Given these unique aspects, it’s no wonder that people who love nature want to visit the place. But the increase in tourism over the past 20 years has pushed the archipelago toward an “unsustainable” future, according to the Charles Darwin Foundation. Exotic, invasive species of plants and animals brought in by tourists and cargo ships pose an “existential threat” to the biodiversity of the Galapagos, in the Foundation’s words. And waste management has become an urgent problem as visitor numbers reach record levels. 

Efforts were made early on to protect the islands. A 1974 master plan for the park published by the government of Ecuador initially proposed a cap on tourists of 12,000 a year. However, in response to growing tourist demand, the Galapagos National Park shifted in the 1980s from capping the overall number of visitors to placing limits on the number of visitors to each site, depending on the location’s ecological vulnerability. In addition, a 1998 Ecuadoran law placed a strict ceiling on the number of ship berths allowed for tourists. 

Today, cruise boats must follow prescribed fixed itineraries that limit the dates and time slots they can visit each island. Vessels are tracked by satellite at the Galapagos National Park headquarters, and park rangers are authorized to board ships to verify their compliance with these regulations.

Though the park’s limits on boat tours with a fixed week-long itinerary have been “successful,” the Foundation said in a report last December, the park has been less effective in limiting land-based tourists, who visit the islands on foot or take day trips on a boat. The number of yearly visitors to the archipelago has risen from 16,000 in 1981 to more than 330,000 in 2023. 

Land-based tourists typically rent a hotel room or Airbnb in Puerto Ayora or on one of the other three inhabited islands, then take a day boat to visit the National Park. There are no limits on land-based visitors, who account for 70% of tourists. 

Imposing limits on land-based visitors would be environmentally beneficial but politically awkward for the local government, since residents depend on tourist dollars spent in restaurants and hotels, says Yolanda Kakabadse, Ecuador’s minister of environment from 1998 to 2000 and the current board president of the Charles Darwin Foundation. “If you are a local and want to increase your wealth, you build a luxury hotel or Airbnb — with no limit,” she told me.

Rakan Zahawi, executive director of the Charles Darwin Foundation, which studies how to protect native species in the Galapagos, acknowledges what is often called “the Galapagos paradox”: The archipelago’s unique, seemingly pristine environment is what attracts tourists, but their very presence threatens to harm it. At the same time, he says, tourism supports conservation, because every visitor pays a park entrance fee ($200 for international visitors), and some visitors may be wealthy donors “who say, ‘I like what you do and would like to support your work.’”

Galapagos tourists who contributed, for example, through the Lindblad Expeditions–National Geographic Fund are among the donors supporting an ongoing effort to reintroduce giant tortoises to Floreana Island. (See sidebar.) 

In addition to donating, tourists can support the efforts to protect the island simply by listening to the rules outlined by their guides and other local experts.

The Biggest Threat

Before my trip, I had read that invasive species, in the form of seeds and insects, had been introduced to the Galapagos — by accident from tourists’ pockets and ship’s cargo — as well as intentionally. For example, Asian blackberry, originally planted for juice production, has become an out-of-control, thorny menace on the islands, covering more than 7,000 acres and threatening to drive out native vegetation.

Zahawi told me that invasive species are “the biggest threat to the integrity of the Galapagos” when I visited the foundation’s research station on Santa Cruz. More than 1,500 new species have been introduced to the islands, 59 of which are “highly invasive,” posing serious risks to native animals and plants, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

“Invasive species are a huge problem because the species in island systems aren’t usually adapted to be so competitive” with introduced species, Zahawi says. So foreign species often out-compete them. 

“Galapagos does a relatively good job to manage this, but it’s almost an impossible task,” Zahawi says. “Every single person that comes here is a risk in terms of bringing something here — a pathogen, a seed stuck to the bottom of your shoe, a fruit someone brings in.”

The avian vampire fly, which likely arrived in a ship’s cargo and lays its eggs in the nests of some 20 bird species, is a major threat to the critically endangered mangrove finch and 12 species of Darwin’s finches. The fly’s larvae attack baby birds through their nostrils and can wipe out the nest. Researchers have been studying a natural enemy to the fly, a wasp that could interrupt this cycle, and the Foundation is hoping to get the go-ahead from the park to introduce it in the wild next year, Zahawi says. 

The threat posed by invasive species is one of the reasons why our guide regularly reminded us of the rules the Galapagos National Park imposes to protect unique Galapagos species. I traveled with the tour company INCA on a luxuriously appointed motor yacht that held 14 passengers. On our first night, our guide reviewed the park rules with us, including the prohibition against touching any of the wildlife. Sea lions and their pups would swim playfully around us while we were snorkeling, he told us. But if we touched the pup, it might absorb human smells, like the scent of sunscreen, and the mother might abandon it.

Visitors can only visit the park’s protected areas with a naturalist guide licensed by the park, who must take a course and pass an exam about the wildlife and environment of the islands. (This applies both to overnight boat cruises and boat day trips. In 2020, the park added a new requirement that its licensed guides also accompany visitors to certain sites near populated towns that had previously been accessible without a guide.) Violation of the rules can result in a guide losing his license. Visitors must stick to paths marked by black and white wooden stakes; stepping outside them could mean treading on the eggs of ground-nesting birds.

The proximity of wildlife and their lack of fear of humans was the most striking thing I noticed as we started our trip. Near the ferry dock on the island of Baltra, where our plane landed, I saw a sea lion lying indolently on a passenger bench. A different day, while I was walking along a trail, a mother sea lion who had been nursing two pups next to me crossed my path on her way to the beach, with a pup close behind. Along the same trail, I came face-to-face with a wide-eyed fluffy white chick, a baby Magnificent Frigatebird, sitting in its nest with its mother. 

This lack of fear is likely due to the way animals and birds in the Galapagos evolved for thousands of years — without predators, on islands isolated from the mainland and from one another. Darwin famously described getting close enough to throw his hat over a finch without it showing any inclination to fly away. 

It’s a reminder not only of what’s uniquely marvelous about a place where animals evolved without human colonization, but also of the extreme vulnerability those animals now face to human-introduced species like cats and rats.

A Remarkable Comeback

On our first day, after a short boat ride from Baltra to the island of Santa Cruz, we traveled from the shore to the highlands, where a brief downpour and green foliage greeted us. Along the way, we spied a few solitary giant tortoises in cow pastures, making their slow seasonal migration from the highlands to nutritious feeding grounds lower down, an annual ritual that starts with the island’s wet season in December and January. 

Our destination was El Chato Ranch, a farm in the tortoises’ migratory path that has been converted to a giant tortoise reserve. We walked along a trail where we encountered tortoises every few yards. It was hard to grasp how these slow-moving animals, weighing more than 500 pounds each, could make such a laborious trek up and down the volcanic hills — a slow migration of around 4 miles in two to three weeks. 

The revived population of the giant tortoise, also called the Galapagos Giant Tortoise, is one of the great success stories of the Galapagos. During the 18th and 19th centuries, these giant animals were hunted almost to extinction by whaling ships and pirates who prized the tortoises for their meat on long voyages. They could be stacked upside down in a ship’s hold and survive for as long as a year without food or drink. 

During his 1835 trip to the Galapagos, Darwin reported hearing of ships that took as many as 700 tortoises on one trip. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, passing ships hunted an estimated 100,000 tortoises, driving the populations of all 15 species on the islands into decline and sending three into extinction. 

By the mid-20th century, dogs, pigs, and rats that sailors and settlers had brought to the islands had further threatened the tortoises’ existence by eating their eggs and hatchlings. So in 1965, the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island opened a captive breeding program, where tortoise eggs brought in from the wild could safely hatch and tortoises were encouraged to breed. 

Baby tortoises are released into the wild when they are about 5 years old and able to withstand predators. About 9,000 hatchlings have been released since 1970, and about a third of the tortoises on the islands owe their existence to the breeding program, according to the Galapagos Conservancy, a research and conservation nonprofit that has participated in the breeding program.

However, the tortoises faced another threat in the form of goats, originally brought to the islands by whalers and pirates. At the rim of Isabela Island’s Alcedo Volcano, during the cool, dry season, thick mists trapped in the trees would drip to form shaded pools of fresh drinking water where tortoises would gather. But by the 1990s, goats had denuded the crater, and the pools, critical to the tortoises’ survival, had disappeared.

Between 1997 and 2006, the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Galapagos National Park embarked on an ambitious goat eradication program on five islands, including Isabela, employing sharpshooters to kill the goats from helicopters. Eventually, the goats learned to be wary of helicopters. So the hunters fitted radio collars on a group of sterilized goats they dubbed “Judas goats” and shot them up with hormones to draw out feral goats. The hunters tracked the Judas goats by radio and shot any feral goats they attracted. By 2005, the last feral goat was removed from Northern Isabela.

Vegetation returned to Isabela almost instantaneously. Tree stumps became small trees, and highland shrubs, cactus, and other native species came back. Researchers are hopeful the tortoise population will rebound, as well. However, goats still roam some of the other islands. Santa Cruz Island “has a pretty healthy population of goats, so there is still work to do on that front,” Zahawi says.

Nowhere Else on Earth

One of the biggest draws of the Galapagos is that it contains one of our planet’s highest proportions of species that are endemic. About 80% of the land birds, 97% of the reptiles and land mammals, and more than 20% of the marine species are found nowhere else on earth. 

Over the course of the week, I would have close encounters with some of these endemic species, including the diminutive Galapagos penguin (the only penguin found near the equator) and the flightless cormorant, which, because of the lack of land predators, evolved so that it no longer had functional wings. 

Hiking atop the black lava rocks on the island of Fernandina, I encountered masses of camouflaged marine iguanas posed stock-still, looking like rocks. These iguanas, the only seagoing lizard in the world, live on land but feed in the sea, on seaweed and algae growing on rocks. I was particularly fascinated by their awkward crawl and plunge from the rocks into the sea and the way their flat tail propelled them through the water.

During the week we also observed some of the 18 species of Darwin’s finches, which have fascinated scientists since Darwin’s time. As Darwin observed, they adapted to the individual environments of the islands where they resided, with distinct differences in beak size and shape. In more recent research, scientists Peter and Rosemary Grant have traced the finches’ evolution — which sometimes occurred in only a few years — to their specific feeding behavior, a response to the changing food supply caused by droughts and climatic cycles. 

A Sobering Sendoff

Our last day reminded me that the Galapagos also provides a protective haven for marine life from threats like overfishing, partly through the Galapagos Marine Reserve. At over 51,000 square miles, it is one of the largest marine protected areas in the world. Still, Chinese fishing fleets have been reported illegally swarming the waters around Galapagos fishing for squid and shark fins.

Yet all seemed safe and peaceful on our afternoon skiff ride into Caleta Tortuga Negra, a sheltered mangrove lagoon on the north side of Santa Cruz where we silently watched several pairs of sea turtles mating on the water’s surface. 

The Galapagos green turtles are endangered, according to the Galapagos Conservation Trust, and rats and cats often eat hatchlings on the beach. Fishermen have long hunted the turtles for their shells and meat. However, trading them has been outlawed, which has caused a dramatic drop in their traffic, according to the trust.

Just below the surface of the water, we could see small blacktip shark pups. Three golden cownose rays, considered near threatened, glided by, flapping their wing-like pectoral fins. The cove’s mangrove roots provide protection from predators and strong waves, and it is one of several areas that have been designated as an important nursery ground for protecting vulnerable shark and ray populations.  

Earlier that morning we had anchored off the island of North Seymour, within sight of Baltra, near the inhabited island of Santa Cruz. It was the first time we experienced an anchorage crowded by multiple boats, including a 90-passenger cruise boat. Numerous day-trippers arrived in groups to trod our route to a tree where male Great Frigatebirds were arrayed, displaying a bright red balloon-like pouch at their throats to attract females. 

The numerous boats and day trippers that day were a sobering reminder that we were no longer alone in our island idyll — and perhaps never had been. I realized I was experiencing my own version of the “Galapagos paradox” — reveling in wonderful glimpses of the natural world while suddenly conscious of the threats posed by the crush of my fellow humans.

Giant Tortoises Return to Floreana Island 

By Sarah Glazer

In a landmark event for the revival of Giant Tortoises, the Galapagos National Park Directorate and its conservation partners released 158 tortoises on Feb. 20, 2026, on the island of Floreana, where they had been extinct since the mid-19th century, largely due to exploitation from whalers.

Dr. James P. Gibbs, vice president of science and conservation at the Galapagos Conservancy, remembers the surprise he felt when he came upon a group of saddleback tortoises on a volcano on Isabela Island during a 2000 survey. 

Genetic testing revealed that the tortoises shared some genetic heritage with the extinct Floreana tortoise, and researchers think they were probably dumped on Isabela by whalers who had picked them up on Floreana. The Floreana tortoises then interbred with the local tortoise. After the 2000 discovery, the park and conservancy embarked on a program to breed tortoises with Floreana lineage.

Giant tortoises are known as “ecosystem engineers”: Their grazing and trampling opens habitat for birds and other wildlife and disperses the seeds of native plants. Researchers hope these tortoises will restore the island’s degraded ecosystem to its former glory.

Rats and feral cats, which feed on tortoise hatchlings, are expected to be fully eradicated as part of the project by the time these tortoises, aged 12-14 years, reach reproductive age in 15-20 years. The “rewilding” effort includes plans to reintroduce up to 100 tortoises annually in coming years and to reintroduce 11 other locally extinct species, including the Floreana Mockingbird, the Vegetarian Finch, and the Little Vermilion Flycatcher.

Reminiscing about the original discovery of the Floreana-related tortoises, Gibbs wrote of the February release of their descendants: “For those of us who stood on that volcanic slope 26 years ago, it is a powerful reminder that sometimes, what seems lost forever is simply awaiting the chance to return.”