Santa Cruz Island

Today we arrived early in the morning at Santa Cruz, the second largest island in the archipelago. We anchored in Academy Bay and in the distance we saw the town of Puerto Ayora, the largest settlement in Galápagos, with about 18,000 people living between the port and the agricultural zone in the highlands.

The island is home to the headquarters of the Galápagos National Park Service (SPNG) and the Charles Darwin Research Station (CDRS). Scientists from all over the world come here every year to gather information for the conservation of the islands’ unique biota. Working closely with the SPNG, the entity responsible for managing the region, they run one the most significant and successful programs in the ecological restoration of the islands: the giant tortoise captive breeding program. Every year, tortoise eggs from different populations are transferred to the station to be incubated under controlled conditions, and baby tortoises are kept until they reach a certain size, when they are repatriated to their original islands to increase the natural populations. Up to date more than 5,000 baby tortoises have been repatriated successfully.

Once we finished our visit to the station we walked toward the town to board the buses and head up to the highlands to see giant tortoises in wild. The highlands of Santa Cruz support a healthy population that migrates seasonally between the highlands and the lowlands as they have for millennia.

Here we walked through pastureland and under trees to the edge of a small pond where we counted as many as fifty tortoises, some of them drinking water at the pond.

After taking hundreds of pictures of these unique creatures, we re-boarded our buses and drove to an area known as the pit craters, or Los Gemelos. These small craters are surrounded by a lush, epiphyte-laden, endemic Scalesia forest. Just when we came out of the bus, in front of us, we were lucky to spot a vermilion flycatcher that stayed for a long time posing for us.

Ferns, orchids and some Darwin’s finches were found along the trail of both pit craters. As the afternoon was coming to its end, we headed back to town for some more shopping or just to experience a little of bit of how locals live in this very isolated but yet very busy little town.

Puerto Ayora was left behind with the orange and red colors of the sunset behind…