Santa Cruz Island
This island is the second largest of the archipelago. Here, we visited the Charles Darwin Research Station with the giant tortoise’s corrals. We had a long walk and we visited many places like the giant tortoises breeding center and Lonesome George’s pen.
The Galápagos National Park Service and the Charles Darwin Foundation are the institutions in charge of the conservation programs in order to restore the populations of endangered species. So far we can see many achievements such as the eradication of goats on Isabela and Santiago Islands, just to mention a few.
The program of breeding tortoises in captivity started back in the 1960s, and today we are still repatriating baby giant tortoises to many islands. These individuals have great chances of survival because they are sent to their home islands at an age free of predators; this is five years for all of them.
At the end of this visit we moved to the highlands of Santa Cruz. This place is evergreen with forests and grasslands where giant tortoises roam freely, sometimes in the National Park and others on the farming areas but still in the wild. We certainly had a great time walking through the forest and photographing these enormous reptiles.
Santa Cruz is a large island and therefore it has a population of around 8000 giant tortoises distributed around the eastern and southwestern slopes. But, this is not all you have here; there are a lot of amazing landscapes and geological formations such as volcanoes and pit craters and flocks of Darwin’s finches.
