🇪🇨 Ecuador · Galápagos
If Galápagos is a dream for any nature lover, Santa Cruz is almost always the way into that dream. It is the most populated and best connected island in the archipelago, and its port, Puerto Ayora, works as the tourist capital of the islands: the day tours, the ferries to the other inhabited islands and most of the excursions all leave from here. But do not let its role as a hub fool you: on its own, Santa Cruz holds some of the most memorable landscapes and wildlife encounters in all of Galápagos.
Science and adventure sit side by side here. At the Charles Darwin Research Station and the tortoise breeding center you get a sense of the fight to save the giant tortoises —the legacy of the famous Lonesome George is written into these islands— and a few kilometers away, in the green highlands, those same tortoises can be seen walking free through the mist. The island also has one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, Tortuga Bay, crevices of crystal-clear water for swimming between lava walls, volcanic tunnels and twin craters that recall the archipelago's fiery origin.
This guide covers Santa Cruz with a practical, warm eye: how to get there from Baltra, what to visit in Puerto Ayora and in the highlands, which day tours are worth it, how to get around and, above all, how to do it responsibly. In Galápagos everything is regulated to protect a fragile, unique ecosystem: there are compulsory entry fees, sites you can only visit with an authorized naturalist guide and strict rules of conduct. Following them is not red tape: it is the condition for this paradise to go on existing.
The history of Santa Cruz is inseparable from that of the whole archipelago. The Galápagos were discovered by chance in 1535, when the ship of the Dominican friar Tomás de Berlanga, bishop of Panama, was swept by the currents to these uninhabited islands; the giant tortoises ('galápagos' in old Spanish) would end up giving them their name. During the 17th to 19th centuries, pirates, whalers and sealers used the islands as a refuge and a larder, taking away tens of thousands of tortoises as live food on board and leaving behind invasive species that are still being fought today. In 1832, General José de Villamil took possession of the islands in the name of newly independent Ecuador, which named them the 'Archipiélago del Ecuador'. In 1835, the young naturalist Charles Darwin arrived aboard HMS Beagle and his observations of the archipelago's wildlife would be key to his theory of evolution by natural selection. Santa Cruz was settled in the 20th century by Ecuadorian and European pioneers —Norwegian colonists among them— who established themselves in Puerto Ayora and in the fertile highlands. In 1959, the centenary of the publication of 'On the Origin of Species', Ecuador declared 97% of the island territory the Galápagos National Park; in 1964 the Charles Darwin Research Station opened on Santa Cruz, and 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 Galápagos islands —and Santa Cruz with them— burst into written history by pure chance. In 1535, the Dominican friar Tomás de Berlanga, then bishop of Panama, was sailing to Peru on the orders of King Charles I of Spain to mediate in the disputes among the conquistadors. Midway through the voyage, his ship was caught in a dead calm and swept out to sea by the currents, far from the coast, until it came upon a group of arid, uninhabited islands that nobody expected to find.
In a letter Berlanga wrote to the king, he described those lands with astonishment and a certain disappointment: a landscape of lava and rock that looked as if it had 'rained stones', where fresh water was hard to find, but inhabited by strangely tame animals that did not flee from people. He mentioned enormous tortoises (the 'galápagos', which would end up naming the archipelago), iguanas and birds that let you come close and even pick them up by hand. That tameness, the result of having evolved without human predators, would centuries later be one of the keys for science, but at the time it only caused puzzlement.
For a long time, the islands were recorded as an inhospitable, hard-to-reach place, without water and with no apparent value to the Crown. They appeared on nautical charts as the 'Islas Encantadas' ('Insulae de los Galopegos'), a name that referred both to the tortoises and to the sense that the islands 'appeared and disappeared' among the mists and the strong currents that confused navigators. Santa Cruz, like the rest of the archipelago, would remain practically unpopulated for centuries.
For more than two centuries after their discovery, the Galápagos had no permanent population, but they did have frequent visitors who were far from friendly to their wildlife. From the 17th century, the islands became a strategic refuge for pirates and privateers —many of them English— who attacked the Spanish galleons carrying riches across the Pacific. The archipelago offered them hiding places, sheltered anchorages and, above all, an extremely valuable resource: the giant tortoises.
The tortoises had one trait that doomed them: they could survive many months without eating or drinking. That made them ideal 'live food' for long sea voyages: pirates and, later, whalers and sealers loaded them by the hundred into their ships' holds as a store of fresh meat. It is reckoned that, between the 17th and 19th centuries, tens of thousands —probably more than a hundred thousand— tortoises were taken from the various islands, driving several populations to the brink of extinction or beyond.
The impact of those visitors was twofold and lasting. On one hand, the direct plundering of tortoises and other animals; on the other, the introduction —deliberate or accidental— of foreign species: goats, pigs, dogs, cats, rats and donkeys that went feral and destroyed the native vegetation, preyed on eggs and hatchlings and competed with the native wildlife. Those invasive species are still today one of the greatest threats to the ecosystems of islands like Santa Cruz, and controlling and eradicating them is a central part of the National Park's conservation work.
The political fate of the Galápagos was sealed a few years after Ecuador was born as an independent country. On 12 February 1832, the Ecuadorian government formally took possession of the archipelago in the name of the young Republic of Ecuador, which had separated from Gran Colombia in 1830. The key figure in this annexation was General José de Villamil, a criollo soldier and businessman who pushed for the islands to be incorporated and for the first colony to be founded.
In that founding act, the islands were officially named the 'Archipiélago del Ecuador', referring to their position on the equatorial line that gives the country its name (the name 'Galápagos', however, prevailed in everyday use). Villamil set up the first settlement on Floreana island (then called Charles or Santa María), with colonists, soldiers and, regrettably, convicts and exiles too, in a colonization experiment that had a hard and troubled life.
The 1832 annexation was decisive for a reason that goes beyond politics: thanks to it, when HMS Beagle visited the archipelago three years later, the islands were already Ecuadorian territory, with a governor and a fledgling colony. That sovereignty laid the ground so that, more than a century later, it would be Ecuador itself that declared the Galápagos a National Park and took on the enormous responsibility of protecting one of the most important natural heritages on the planet, including islands that are populated today, such as Santa Cruz.
In September 1835, a young English naturalist of 26 arrived in the Galápagos aboard HMS Beagle, a British Navy ship on a round-the-world survey expedition. That naturalist was Charles Darwin, and his stay of barely five weeks in the archipelago would in time become one of the most celebrated episodes in the history of science. Darwin traveled around several islands, collected specimens, took notes and was intrigued by what he saw.
What caught his attention was the variation of species between neighboring islands. He observed that the giant tortoises differed depending on which island they came from —so much so that the vice-governor assured him he could tell which island each one came from by the shape of its shell— and that apparently similar birds showed notable differences, above all in the shape of the beak. Those birds, famous today as 'Darwin's finches', had beaks adapted to different foods (seeds, insects, fruit), as if an ancestral species had diversified to take on different roles.
Darwin did not formulate his theory on the islands; it was years later, reflecting on these and other observations, that he developed the idea of the evolution of species by natural selection, published in 1859 in 'On the Origin of Species'. The Galápagos thus became the 'living laboratory of evolution', a place where the isolation of each island made it possible to watch nature 'experimenting' with life. Today, the Research Station that bears his name, on Santa Cruz, keeps that legacy of research and conservation alive.
Unlike Floreana or San Cristóbal, which had earlier settlements, Santa Cruz was only settled permanently in the 20th century. The island, with its large size and its fertile highlands (where the moisture of the garúa allows farming), drew waves of pioneers looking for a new life far from the mainland. Among the first colonists there were Ecuadorians from the mainland and also Europeans, especially a group of Norwegian immigrants who arrived in the 1920s with the idea of setting up fishing and canning industries.
Life for those first settlers was extremely hard. Many projects failed because of the lack of fresh water, the inhospitable terrain, the extreme isolation and the difficulty of selling what they produced. Some Norwegian colonists left the island; others stayed and put down roots. Little by little the island's two centers took shape: Puerto Ayora, on the south coast, which would grow as a port and service center, and the farming villages of the highlands, such as Bellavista and Santa Rosa, given over to crops and cattle.
Over the decades, and above all with the tourism boom in the second half of the 20th century, Puerto Ayora became the most dynamic center in the whole archipelago. Today Santa Cruz is the most populated island in Galápagos and holds most of the tourist, scientific and commercial activity. That growth, however, brings challenges of its own: pressure on water, waste, the arrival of new invasive species and the need to balance the development of the local population with conservation of the unique setting that makes the island special.
In the middle of the 20th century, the world began to grasp the irreplaceable value of the Galápagos and the threats closing in on them. The key year was 1959: coinciding with the centenary of the publication of Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species', the government of Ecuador declared about 97% of the archipelago's land area the Galápagos National Park, leaving the remaining 3% for populated areas such as Puerto Ayora. It was one of the first great acts of protection for this natural heritage.
A few years later, in 1964, the Charles Darwin Research Station opened on Santa Cruz, next to Puerto Ayora, run by the Charles Darwin Foundation —an international organization created in 1959 under the auspices of Unesco and the IUCN—. The station became the nerve center of scientific research and conservation advice on the islands, with pioneering programs such as the captive breeding and repatriation of giant tortoises, which saved several populations from extinction.
International recognition came in 1978, when the Galápagos became the first site in the world inscribed on Unesco's list of Natural World Heritage Sites. Later, the archipelago was also declared a Biosphere Reserve and the Galápagos Marine Reserve was created, one of the largest on the planet. Today, islands like Santa Cruz face the permanent challenge of balancing tourism, the growth of the local population and conservation: fighting invasive species, regulating the arrival of visitors (with the Park entry fee and the Transit Control Card) and promoting sustainable tourism so that this evolutionary treasure can go on amazing the generations to come.