Espumilla Beach, Buccaneer’s Cove and Puerto Egas (Santiago Island)

This time National Geographic Islander navigated toward the central part of the archipelago. Soon enough we were anchoring next to the famous island of James. As we all have heard about Charles Darwin, we couldn’t wait to set aground on this island. Santiago is the island where Darwin spent nine days exploring and collecting finches and other specimens. Lindblad Expeditions and National Geographic had adopted Santiago as our focused island, most of our funding has gone here to eradicate introduced species like goats and pigs that were causing problems for the Galápagos. About 80,000 goats were eradicated in Santiago; nowadays the niches in this habitat are being recovered over evolutionary time. We snorkeled at Buccaneer’s Cove, a legendary place visited by many sailors who passed by the islands collecting tortoises and freshwater.

After midday the expedition continued, this time Puerto Egas was our visitor site. We had a wet landing on a beautiful black sand beach made by the erosion of tuff cones (compacted ash) and pure basaltic lava. Our trail led us to unique scenery where the brown contrasts the black and green, surrounded by young lava flows and endemic flora, this is the island that charmed Darwin while collecting many species of finches and mockingbirds. On our hike we encountered an endemic specie of scorpion that inhabits the Galápagos.

As we walked along the coastline many species of shore birds were feeding on the small crabs and snail eggs exposed by the low tide and fish isolated in the small tide pools. The marine fauna here was different from one tide pool to the other; we even had the chance to enjoy a couple of striated herons while they were catching crabs and small fish in front of us. Very flat and wide lava fields had covered most of the coastline, providing a great habitat for many species of shellfish and even larger mammal like the Galápagos fur seals (truly a species of sea lion). Some interesting geological features like the grottos (collapsed lava tubes) are the perfect home chosen for these fur sea lions, so many of them were resting and waiting for the night to go fishing.

We headed back to National Geographic Islander, wrapping up another amazing day in paradise.