🇪🇨 Ecuador · Galápagos (Islands)
Puerto Ayora, on Santa Cruz island, is the biggest and most touristy town in Galápagos and the archipelago's real nerve center. Most of the hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, dive shops and services are concentrated here, which makes it the favorite base for people exploring the islands independently (not on a cruise). It is a town with a relaxed pace, turned towards the sea, with a pleasant malecón and the comings and goings of travelers from all over the world.
Puerto Ayora is home to the Charles Darwin Research Station, the heart of research and conservation in the archipelago, and the starting point for some of the most visited sites on Santa Cruz: Bahía Tortuga (Tortuga Bay), one of the most beautiful beaches in the world; the highlands with giant tortoises in the wild, the lava tunnels and the twin craters of Los Gemelos; and the pier where the boats leave for other islands and for diving and snorkeling sites.
This guide covers Puerto Ayora with practical judgment: how to get there (via Baltra airport and the Itabaca channel), what to see in town and on Santa Cruz, where to eat (including the famous kiosk street), where to sleep and how to use it as a base for excursions. It is the best support point for discovering Galápagos at your own pace.
Puerto Ayora began as a small fishing settlement on Academy Bay, on Santa Cruz island, settled in part by European colonists (among them Norwegians) in the early and middle 20th century. It is named after the Ecuadorian president Isidro Ayora. With the creation of the Galápagos National Park (1959) and the Charles Darwin Research Station (1964), and the later tourism boom, it grew into the archipelago's main town. 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.
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.
In 1535, a ship sailing from Peru to Panama was left adrift, without wind, dragged by the currents to a handful of volcanic islands lost in the Pacific. On board was Friar Tomás de Berlanga, bishop of Panama, who left the first European record of the Galápagos: a place so dry and bewildering that, he wrote, it seemed God had rained down stones. So began the written history of an archipelago that sailors, because of its treacherous currents and how hard it was to fix its position, named 'Las Encantadas', the enchanted islands. Four centuries later, on one of those islands —Santa Cruz— Puerto Ayora would be born.
The archipelago, of volcanic origin, rose out of the Pacific Ocean about 1,000 km from the mainland coast of Ecuador and remained uninhabited by humans for almost all of its existence, which allowed its unique wildlife to evolve.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, the islands were a refuge for pirates and privateers who raided the coasts of the Spanish Pacific, and later, in the 19th century, a base for the whalers who worked these waters. Both decimated the giant tortoise populations, loading them alive onto their ships as a reserve of fresh meat, since they could survive months without eating or drinking. That plunder marked the beginning of human pressure on the islands' wildlife.
In 1832, newly independent, Ecuador officially annexed the archipelago. Three years later, in 1835, the young naturalist Charles Darwin arrived aboard HMS Beagle and spent five weeks studying the flora and fauna; his observations of the differences between the finches and the tortoises of each island would be key to his theory of evolution by natural selection, published in 'On the Origin of Species' (1859). Santa Cruz island, where Puerto Ayora stands today, was then rough and practically unpopulated territory.
Puerto Ayora sits on Academy Bay, on the south coast of Santa Cruz island. The history of the modern town starts in the 1920s, when a group of Norwegian colonists landed on Santa Cruz with a specific dream: setting up a cannery and a farming commune on those remote islands. The first Norwegians arrived around 1926 and took up fishing and canning tortoise, lobster and grouper in the sheltered Academy Bay, whose protected anchorage was ideal for dealing with the ships that came from the mainland. The project failed soon enough, though: the cannery's boiler exploded in 1927 and put an end to the industrial venture. A little later other Norwegians arrived, along with a handful of Europeans, Americans and Ecuadorians, all looking for a simpler life. In the late 1920s, the settlement was officially named Puerto Ayora, in honor of Isidro Ayora, then president of Ecuador.
Life for those first settlers was extremely hard: fresh water was scarce, the soil difficult and the isolation extreme, with ships passing only now and then. They subsisted on fishing, on farming in the highlands and on livestock. 'Playa de los Alemanes', near the town, recalls another group of those early European colonists. That small community, a mix of mainland Ecuadorians and Scandinavian and central European immigrants, was the seed of what would in time become the archipelago's main town.
For decades, Puerto Ayora was a remote fishing village, untouched by tourism, whose fate would change radically from the mid-20th century with the arrival of science and conservation.
The turning point in the history of Puerto Ayora came with the institutionalization of conservation in Galápagos. In 1959, coinciding with the centenary of the publication of Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species', Ecuador declared the Galápagos National Park, protecting most of the archipelago's surface. Shortly after, in 1964, the Charles Darwin Research Station opened near Puerto Ayora, run by the Charles Darwin Foundation, which turned the town into the center of research and conservation in the islands.
The station drove pioneering programs, such as the captive breeding of giant tortoises to repopulate the islands, and became a global emblem of biodiversity protection. The famous 'Lonesome George' lived out his last years here, the last individual of the Pinta island giant tortoise, a planetary symbol of species on the brink of extinction, who died in 2012.
From the 1970s and 1980s, nature tourism grew strongly and Puerto Ayora was transformed: from a fishing village it became the most populated and dynamic town in Galápagos, with hotels, restaurants, agencies and a bustling life tied to visitors. In 1978, UNESCO declared Galápagos its first World Heritage site, and in 1986 the Galápagos Marine Reserve was created, one of the largest in the world, protecting the waters around the islands.
Today Puerto Ayora, with several thousand inhabitants, embodies like nowhere else the central dilemma of Galápagos: how to reconcile the development of a growing population and a tourism industry that drives the economy with the need to preserve one of the most valuable and fragile ecosystems on the planet. The town concentrates most of the archipelago's tourism infrastructure and receives hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.
That success brings enormous challenges: pressure on fresh water and energy, waste generation, the risk of introducing invasive species (one of the greatest dangers for native wildlife), fishing and urban growth. To face them, the authorities have set strict controls: the INGALA Transit Control Card, which regulates the entry of people; quarantines and baggage checks to stop invasive species; limits on residence and land use; and a National Park entry fee that in August 2024 doubled to 200 dollars for adult foreign visitors, in order to fund conservation.
The Charles Darwin Research Station and the National Park continue to work on restoration programs —such as the recovery of the giant tortoises and the eradication of introduced species on several islands—, many of them with remarkable results. Visiting Puerto Ayora today is looking into that permanently strained balance: a vibrant, welcoming town that lives from the sea and from tourism, at the heart of an irreplaceable natural laboratory that the whole world has committed to protecting.