Galapagos Islands History
The Galapagos Islands are among the youngest landmasses on Earth, built by volcanoes still active today. Yet their human history is younger still. No indigenous population ever settled here. The islands appear to have been unknown to any civilisation until 1535, when a becalmed Spanish ship drifted into them by accident.
What followed, in a comparatively short space of time, was an outsized cast of characters. Buccaneers hiding from Spanish galleons, whalers hunting the archipelago’s giant tortoises to the edge of extinction, a young naturalist whose five weeks here reshaped how we understand life on Earth, and, two centuries later, American soldiers stationed on a volcanic airstrip watching for a Japanese attack that never came.
Little of it is visible at first glance. The Galapagos still look, in large part, as they must have looked to the first sailors who spotted them.
