🇪🇨 Ecuador · Galápagos (Islands)
Floreana is one of the inhabited islands of the Galápagos and, despite its small size, one with the most fascinating and mysterious history in the archipelago. It was among the first to be settled and the setting for legends of pirates, solitary colonists and a famous saga of disappearances in the 1930s that still fascinates the world. Its only settlement, Puerto Velasco Ibarra, is a tiny, quiet village of very few people.
In natural terms, Floreana is a destination of real value: it holds the famous Post Office Bay, with its historic mail barrel working since the 18th century; the Corona del Diablo (Devil's Crown), a submerged volcanic cone that is one of the best snorkelling sites in the archipelago; flamingos in its lagoons and sea turtles nesting on its beaches. It is also one of the key places for the ecological restoration programmes of the Galápagos.
This guide covers Floreana with a practical eye: how to get there (on a day trip from Santa Cruz or staying over in the village), what to see and do —Post Office Bay, Corona del Diablo, viewpoints and beaches—, its incredible history and the National Park rules. It's an island for anyone after nature, excellent snorkelling and a one-of-a-kind human story.
Floreana was one of the first inhabited islands in the Galápagos: a watering stop for whalers and pirates, home of the historic mail barrel at Post Office Bay (since the 18th century) and of the first Ecuadorian colony in the archipelago in the 19th century. In the 1930s it was the setting for the famous and still unsolved 'Floreana mystery', a saga of European settlers marked by deaths and disappearances. The full version is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The enchanted archipelago of the Pacific: a living laboratory of evolution that inspired Charles Darwin, the first Natural World Heritage Site of Unesco (1978) and a National Park since 1959, home to giant tortoises, marine iguanas and blue-footed boobies.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
On an island of fewer than two hundred people, three Europeans vanished without a trace and two others turned up dead in circumstances that were never cleared up. It happened in the 1930s, and the 'Floreana mystery' is still unsolved almost a century later. But the story of this small island in the south of the Galápagos doesn't begin with that riddle: it begins much earlier, with thirsty pirates, solitary whalers and a wooden barrel that has been playing postman for more than two centuries.
Floreana was one of the first islands in the Galápagos to matter to sailors. Its relative abundance of fresh water in the highlands made it, from the 17th and 18th centuries on, a watering and resting point for pirates, buccaneers and above all whalers working the eastern Pacific. Those sailors also exploited the island's giant tortoises, which they loaded alive onto their ships as a store of fresh meat, decimating the populations.
The island's most endearing tradition comes from that era: the mail barrel at Post Office Bay. Towards the end of the 18th century, whalers set up a wooden barrel where they left their letters, trusting that some other sailor heading home would pick them up and deliver them. That is how an informal 'post office' based on solidarity between seafarers was born.
The tradition has survived more than two centuries: today visitors leave unstamped postcards in the barrel and take the ones they can hand-deliver when they get back to their own countries. It is one of the most singular customs in the Galápagos and a living link to its seafaring past.
Floreana also holds a central place in the history of Ecuador's presence in the Galápagos. In 1832, shortly after the archipelago was officially incorporated into Ecuador, General José de Villamil established the first Ecuadorian colony in the Galápagos on this island, up in the highlands, called Asilo de la Paz. The island was named Floreana after Juan José Flores, Ecuador's first president, under whose government the annexation took place.
The colony, made up partly of convicts and partly of settlers, had a hard and troubled life and never prospered as expected. A few years later, in 1835, Floreana received an illustrious visitor: the young naturalist Charles Darwin, during the famous voyage of HMS Beagle. The observations Darwin made in the Galápagos about how species varied from island to island proved fundamental to the development of his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Through the 19th century and into the early 20th, Floreana alternated attempts at settlement with long stretches of near-abandonment, keeping its reputation as a remote island with a turbulent history.
The episode that made Floreana famous worldwide is the so-called 'Floreana mystery', one of the strangest true stories of the 20th century. In the early 1930s, a handful of European settlers, mostly German, moved to the island looking for a life away from civilisation. Among them were the doctor Friedrich Ritter and his companion Dore Strauch, vegetarians and philosophers in search of an idyllic existence; the Wittmer family, who arrived later; and, above all, an eccentric self-proclaimed 'baroness', Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet, who came with two lovers, meant to build a luxury hotel and behaved as though she owned the island.
Tensions between the settlers, scarcity, isolation and strong personalities produced an increasingly grim atmosphere. In 1934, the baroness and one of her companions disappeared without a trace in circumstances that were never explained; shortly afterwards, the other lover died trying to leave the island, and Doctor Ritter himself died suspiciously of food poisoning. The chain of deaths and disappearances was never fully resolved.
The mystery, fed by the contradictory accounts of the survivors (especially the Wittmers, whose family went on living on the island), has inspired books, documentaries and films. Today it is inseparable from the aura of Floreana, a small and peaceful island whose human history is as intense as its nature.
After the era of the European settlers, Floreana settled into a small, stable community around Puerto Velasco Ibarra, its only settlement, with barely around 150 residents. It is the least populated inhabited island in the Galápagos, and some of its neighbours are direct descendants of the people at the centre of its story, such as the Wittmer family, who keep a guesthouse in the village. Life goes at an unhurried pace, dependent on fishing, farming in the highlands and a tourism trade that is still finding its feet.
In 1959, with the creation of Galápagos National Park, and in 1978, with UNESCO's World Heritage listing, Floreana became part of the strictest system of protected areas in the country. But the island carried a serious problem: centuries of human presence had introduced invasive species —rats, feral cats, goats, donkeys— that devastated its native wildlife and drove several species to local extinction, including its original giant tortoise and birds such as the Floreana mockingbird, which today survives only on nearby islets.
That is why Floreana has become the setting for one of the most ambitious ecological restoration projects in the archipelago. Since the 2010s, the National Park, the Charles Darwin Foundation and international organisations have worked on eradicating invasive species and on the gradual reintroduction of native species and of giant tortoises related to the original ones, aiming to give the island back some of its lost ecosystem. It is a complex effort, because it has to fit around the life of the local community, and it makes Floreana a symbol of the difficult, hopeful work of repairing ecological damage in the Galápagos.
What makes the Floreana mystery irresistible is not just the chain of deaths, but that every witness told a different version. The only ones left to tell it —Margret and Heinz Wittmer and the solitary Dore Strauch— quietly accused one another for the rest of their lives, and each published their own account: Dore Strauch wrote 'Satán llegó al Edén' and Margret Wittmer 'Postal de Floreana', two books that contradict each other on the key points. The bodies of the baroness Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet and her lover Robert Philippson were never found; the other lover, Rudolph Lorenz, turned up mummified months later on Marchena Island, where he had tried to escape by boat; and Doctor Friedrich Ritter, a militant vegetarian, died after eating poisoned chicken meat, pointing at Dore with his last gesture.
Fascination with the case has only grown. It inspired the acclaimed documentary 'The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden' (2013), several investigative books and, in the 2020s, a widely watched series that carried the riddle to a new generation. The Wittmer descendants still live in Puerto Velasco Ibarra and for years ran the guesthouse that carries their surname, so a visitor can literally stay in the home of one of the families of the mystery.
Today the legend is palpable at every point of the itinerary: the Mirador de la Baronesa, from where Eloise claimed to watch the ships come in; the caves of the Asilo de la Paz, where the first settlers took shelter; and the stories the guides unspool between one snorkelling stop and the next. That mix of natural beauty and human riddle is what makes Floreana one of the most sought-after and talked-about islands in the whole of the Galápagos: few places in the world let you swim over a submerged crater full of sharks and walk through the scene of an unsolved crime on the same day.