🇪🇨 Ecuador · Galápagos
Isabela is the largest island in Galápagos and, for many travelers, the one you fall for hardest. With its seahorse shape drawn by five volcanoes —some still smoking— it's a young, wild, volcanically alive place where the land is still forming. Its only town, Puerto Villamil, is a haven of sandy streets, hammocks and sunsets, the perfect spot to slow down and feel the most relaxed side of Galápagos, far from the bustle of Santa Cruz.
But don't let the calm fool you: Isabela packs in some of the best experiences in the whole archipelago. It's climbing on foot to the rim of the Sierra Negra caldera, one of the largest on the planet, and looking out over a lunar landscape of black lava; it's snorkeling at Los Túneles, a maze of lava arches and bridges where turtles, sharks and seahorses swim; it's swimming among white-tip sharks and seeing Galápagos penguins up close at Las Tintoreras; and it's walking beside pink flamingos and giant tortoises a few steps from town.
This guide covers Isabela with a practical, warm eye: how to get there by ferry, what to see between volcanoes and beaches, the best snorkeling trips and how to do it all responsibly. Keep in mind that Isabela is even more isolated than the other islands (little connectivity, few ATMs, a slow pace) and that, as everywhere in Galápagos, there are compulsory entry fees, sites you can only visit with an authorized naturalist guide and strict rules of conduct. Respecting them is what keeps this unique corner of the planet intact.
Isabela's history is the history of the whole archipelago, with its own dramatic shading. The Galápagos were discovered by chance in 1535, when the ship of the Dominican friar Tomás de Berlanga was swept by currents to these uninhabited islands; the giant tortoises ('galápagos') would give them their name. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, pirates, whalers and sealers used the islands as a refuge and a larder, taking away tens of thousands of tortoises and leaving invasive species behind (goats and other animals which, on Isabela, became a plague fought for decades). In 1832 General José de Villamil took possession of the archipelago for newly independent Ecuador, which named it the 'Archipiélago del Ecuador'; Puerto Villamil carries his name. In 1835 HMS Beagle sailed the islands and the young Charles Darwin observed the wildlife that would inspire his theory of evolution by natural selection. In the 20th century Isabela had a penal colony whose most notorious episode was the building of the Muro de las Lágrimas, raised by prisoners out of lava stone under brutal conditions. In 1959 Ecuador declared 97% of the territory a National Park; in 1978 UNESCO made Galápagos its first Natural World Heritage Site. The full story 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.
Read the history of Galápagos →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The written history of the Galápagos —and of Isabela, the largest of all the islands— began by pure chance. In 1535 the Dominican friar Tomás de Berlanga, bishop of Panama, was sailing for Peru on the orders of King Charles I of Spain to mediate between the conquistadors. A long calm left his ship without wind, and the ocean currents dragged it out to sea until it came upon an archipelago of arid, uninhabited islands nobody expected to find.
In his famous letter to the king, Berlanga described a volcanic landscape that seemed to have been sown with stones, with almost no fresh water, but inhabited by astonishingly tame animals: enormous tortoises, iguanas and birds that let you approach without fear. That tameness, the result of evolving without human predators, was then no more than a curiosity, but centuries later it would make the islands an irreplaceable treasure for science.
For a long time the islands were recorded as inhospitable and worthless, and appeared on nautical charts as the 'Islas Encantadas' (the Enchanted Isles), partly because the strong currents and mists made them hard to locate and gave the impression that they appeared and disappeared. The name 'Galápagos' referred to the giant tortoises. Isabela, young and volcanically active, would remain practically unpopulated for centuries, waiting for its place in history.
Isabela has a history that begins long before the human one: a geological history still being written. It's the largest island in the archipelago —on its own it accounts for more than half of all the land surface of Galápagos— and also one of the youngest. Its distinctive seahorse shape is the result of six large shield volcanoes merging in a line from north to south: Ecuador, Wolf, Darwin, Alcedo, Sierra Negra and Cerro Azul. Wolf, at 1,707 meters, is the highest point in the whole Galápagos archipelago.
Isabela's volcanoes are among the most active in the archipelago. Sierra Negra has one of the largest calderas in the world and has erupted in recent times (the last major event in 2018); Cerro Azul and Wolf have also erupted in the last few decades. This constant activity makes Isabela a privileged place to watch, almost live, how oceanic islands are born and grow out of volcanism.
The geology also explains the island's unique biology. Each volcano, cut off from the others by vast lava fields that are hard to cross, developed its own subpopulation of giant tortoises, adapted to its surroundings: that's why several tortoise forms live side by side on Isabela, one of the reasons the archipelago is such an extraordinary laboratory of evolution. The Galápagos sit over a 'hotspot' in the Earth's mantle, across which the Nazca plate moves slowly, producing ever younger islands towards the west, where Isabela lies.
Like the rest of the archipelago, Isabela was for centuries a refuge and a larder for pirates, privateers, whalers and sealers. From the 17th century on, these visitors used the islands as a hideout and a resupply point, and found in the giant tortoises a tragic resource: able to survive many months without food or water, they were loaded by the hundred into ships' holds as 'living food' for long sea voyages. It's estimated that between the 17th and 19th centuries tens of thousands of tortoises were taken from the archipelago, decimating whole populations, including those of Isabela's various volcanoes.
But the most lasting damage came from the species they left behind. On Isabela, introduced goats became a genuine plague: with no natural predators they multiplied into the tens of thousands and stripped the vegetation that tortoises and other native species depended on, severely disrupting the island's ecosystems. Feral pigs, dogs, cats, rats and donkeys completed the picture, preying on eggs and young and competing with native wildlife.
The fight against these invasive species is one of the great chapters of modern conservation in Galápagos. On Isabela in particular, ambitious large-scale goat eradication projects were carried out —among the biggest of their kind in the world— which, after years of effort, removed hundreds of thousands of animals and allowed the vegetation and the tortoise populations to recover. It's a reminder of just how much the arrival of human beings transformed these islands, and of the enormous work it takes to repair it.
The political fate of Isabela —and of the whole archipelago— was sealed on 12 February 1832, when the government of newly independent Ecuador formally took possession of the Galápagos, which were officially renamed the 'Archipiélago del Ecuador'. The key figure was General José de Villamil, a soldier and businessman who drove both the annexation and the first colonization (on Floreana island). His name has been tied to Isabela ever since: its only town, Puerto Villamil, is named in his honor.
Three years later, in September 1835, the British Navy vessel HMS Beagle sailed the archipelago on its round-the-world voyage, with the young naturalist Charles Darwin aboard. Darwin visited several islands and observed the tame wildlife and the variation of species from one island to the next —tortoises by their shells, birds by their beaks— observations that, years later, would feed his revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection, published in 1859 in 'On the Origin of Species'.
The diversity of Isabela's tortoises, with a distinct form associated with each volcano, is precisely the kind of phenomenon that made Galápagos the 'living laboratory of evolution'. Thanks to the 1832 annexation, by the time the Beagle arrived the islands were already Ecuadorian territory, and it would be Ecuador itself that, more than a century later, took on the enormous responsibility of protecting them as a National Park and as world heritage.
Isabela holds one of the darkest episodes in the human history of Galápagos. Through much of the 20th century, at different moments, the islands housed penal colonies, using their extreme isolation as a natural prison. One of them operated on Isabela, and from that period comes the monument most heavily charged with pain in the whole archipelago: the Muro de las Lágrimas.
Between 1945 and 1959, the inmates of the Isabela penal colony were forced to build, with their bare hands and under a scorching sun, an enormous wall of immensely heavy lava stones, about 100 meters long and several meters high. The work was brutal and essentially pointless —a form of punishment rather than a construction with a purpose— and it cost the lives of many prisoners through exhaustion, abuse and inhuman conditions. Out of that suffering came its name and the phrase that goes with it: 'the weak cry and the strong die'.
The penal colony was finally closed towards the end of the 1950s, partly because of the abuses and violent incidents. Today the Muro de las Lágrimas still stands, silent among the vegetation, as a memorial recalling that the settling of Galápagos was not only adventure and science, but also exploitation and hardship. Visiting it —after a lovely bike ride past beaches and mangroves from Puerto Villamil— is an experience that invites reflection on the most human and tragic side of the islands' history.
By the middle of the 20th century the world had woken up to the irreplaceable value of the Galápagos and to the threats hanging over them. The decisive year was 1959: coinciding with the centenary of Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species', Ecuador declared close to 97% of the archipelago's land surface the Galápagos National Park, leaving only 3% for populated areas such as Puerto Villamil. That same year the Charles Darwin Foundation was created, under the auspices of UNESCO and the IUCN, and in 1964 it would open its Research Station on Santa Cruz.
International recognition came in 1978, when the Galápagos became the first site in the world inscribed on UNESCO's Natural World Heritage list. Later the archipelago would also be declared a Biosphere Reserve, and the Galápagos Marine Reserve would be established, one of the largest protected marine areas on the planet, embracing the rich waters west of Isabela.
Today Isabela lives with the permanent challenge of balancing the life of its small population, tourism and the conservation of an exceptional and still volcanically active environment. The tools include the National Park entry fee (updated in 2024) and the Transit Control Card, which regulate and fund the protection; the large projects to eradicate invasive species such as goats, which restored the health of its ecosystems; the breeding and repatriation of giant tortoises at centers such as Arnaldo Tupiza; and the promotion of responsible tourism, with naturalist guides, capped numbers and strict rules. Only that way will this island of fire that travelers fall so hard for be able to remain a living sanctuary of evolution for the generations to come.