Today at around eight o’clock in the morning we were ready to disembark from the National Geographic Islander to Puerto Ayora. In this picturesque town, capital of Santa Cruz Island, you can feel immersed in a very warm multicultural environment. People from all over Ecuador came last century to colonize this area, starting in the early 1930s.
Puerto Ayora is the home of the two main institutions that work very hard for the conservation of the islands, the Charles Darwin Research Station and the Galápagos National Park. We visited the “Fausto Llerena” tortoise breeding center. This center was named after one of the pioneering National Park wardens who has been working most of his life with the Galápagos giant tortoises. On any given day you can still see Fausto feeding or measuring the tortoises, activities that he has been doing for a long, long time.
Of the several facilities at the breeding center, one in particular is very popular, the one that includes a celebrity, ¨Lonesome George¨. His story, unfortunately, is very sad and it is well known inside and outside the Galápagos Islands. He is the last giant tortoise survivor from Pinta Island. He is the only known living individual of his subspecies. Today George was in the mood; he was out posing for our guests’ avid cameras just like a movie star. We met a second famous giant tortoise, Diego, whose beautiful story is much happier than Georges’. “Super Diego”, as we call him, has fathered hundreds of the rare Española tortoise subspecies. This famous reptile has helped to save his own subspecies from extinction. After mass tortoise poaching over the course of many decades, unfortunately only 14 surviving adult individuals were found living on Española Island in the 1960’s. Nowadays, after many years of successful repatriation there are close to 1700 tortoises on Española Island.
In the afternoon, after a delightful lunch in a local colorful open-air restaurant in the highlands of Santa Cruz, we had the thrill of observing the magnificent Galápagos giant tortoises in their natural habitat.
