Santa Cruz Island
This morning we woke up in the center of the Galápagos archipelago. In the early morning the National Geographic Endeavour anchored at Academy Bay on the southern side of Santa Cruz Island.
At 8:00 in the morning we boarded the Zodiacs to head to the dock at Puerto Ayora. Here we visited the Charles Darwin Research Station and the giant tortoises at the Galápagos National Park corrals. We saw many huge tortoises, some of them older than a hundred years and some others less than two years old and very small.
The small tortoises are part of a breeding program carried out by the Galápagos National Park Service. Breeding tortoises in captivity is not an easy matter. It takes time, patience and experience. And the park officers have all of those. So far this program has been a rotund success, restoring the populations of giant tortoises that were endangered back in the 60s.
At the end of this visit we boarded buses to visit the green highlands of Santa Cruz. We had lunch here in a restaurant in the middle of the forest with ample space and gardens with colorful flowers.
We ended the day visiting the real highlands and evergreen forest with giant tortoises in the wild. These iconic reptiles are distributed around a large part of the island and in total the population is said to be around 8,000 individuals, most of them located on the western side of the island.
It was a terrific day and I can’t wait to see more!
