Santa Cruz is the island where almost everyone travelling to Galápagos independently ends up setting up base. Puerto Ayora has hotels for every budget, cheap food on the kiosk street and a dock from which boats and tours leave for half a dozen islands. And without getting on any boat you already see plenty: sea lions sleeping on the benches at the fishermen's pier, marine iguanas on the beach and giant tortoises wandering through the grass in the highlands.
The island changes a lot in just a few kilometres. On the coast it's hot, cacti grow and there are white-sand beaches like Tortuga Bay. Heading up towards Cerro Crocker the air turns humid and you reach the scalesia forests of Los Gemelos and the pastures where the tortoises of El Chato gather. In half an hour by car you go from an almost desert landscape to a green, misty one, and that explains much of the variety of animals you'll come across.
Galápagos isn't cheap: just getting in costs US$ 100 or US$ 200 depending on your nationality, plus US$ 20 for the transit card, and tours to other islands cost over US$ 200. But Santa Cruz is where your budget stretches furthest. Many of its visitor sites are free or cost a few dollars, you can reach them on foot or by water taxi, and you can choose which excursions to pay for instead of buying a full cruise.
The Galápagos were discovered by chance on 10 March 1535 by Friar Tomás de Berlanga, who was sailing from Panama to Peru. For centuries they were a refuge for pirates and whalers, who gave this island several names: the English pirate William Ambrosia Cowley called it Duke of Norfolk's Island in 1684, and the British later knew it as Indefatigable, after the ship HMS Indefatigable. Ecuador annexed the archipelago on 12 February 1832, and in the 1892 renaming the island became Santa Cruz. Charles Darwin arrived on the Beagle in September 1835 and studied four islands of the archipelago. Puerto Ayora's bay, Academy Bay (Bahía de la Academia), is named after the schooner Academy of the California Academy of Sciences, which visited it in 1905. In 1926 a group of Norwegian settlers arrived, dreaming of a cannery and a farming commune; the settlement began with them and took the name of President Isidro Ayora. In 1959 the government of Camilo Ponce Enríquez declared 97% of the archipelago a national park, Ecuador's first protected area, and in 1964 the Charles Darwin Research Station opened in Puerto Ayora. The Galápagos became a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1978 and an Ecuadorian province on 18 February 1973. In 1971 Lonesome George, the last tortoise of his species, was found on Pinta Island; he lived on Santa Cruz until his death on 24 June 2012, and since 2017 his embalmed body has been on display at the Fausto Llerena Breeding Centre. Today Puerto Ayora is the largest town in Galápagos and lives off tourism, artisanal fishing and transport. In 2024, 279.277 tourists entered the archipelago, and 78% chose to stay on land
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 →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 13 activities in Santa Cruz. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
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.
