Galápagos National Park

Galápagos National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

The Galápagos are a thousand kilometres out in the Pacific from mainland Ecuador, reached only by air, from Quito or Guayaquil to the airports on Baltra, beside Santa Cruz island, or San Cristóbal, in about two hours from Guayaquil, and every visitor passes through the same formalities: a transit control card bought at the mainland airport, a biosecurity inspection of luggage, and on arrival the national park entrance fee, paid in cash, which was doubled in August 2024 to two hundred dollars for most foreign adults, with lower rates for children and for citizens of some neighbouring countries. After that there are two ways of seeing the islands. The classic one is a live-aboard cruise, of four, five or eight days, on vessels carrying from twelve to a hundred passengers, which sail at night and land twice a day at the park's designated visitor sites, including those on the remote western and northern islands, Fernandina, Genovesa, Española, that day-trippers cannot reach;

it is the better experience, and costs accordingly. The other, which has grown enormously and is what the four- and five-day packages sold online generally mean, is to stay in hotels in the three inhabited ports, Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz, Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on San Cristóbal and Puerto Villamil on Isabela, travel between them by public speedboat, two bumpy hours a leg, and take day tours by boat to nearby uninhabited islands such as North Seymour, Bartolomé, South Plaza and Santa Fe, and to snorkelling sites such as Kicker Rock and Los Túneles. By law, nearly every site in the park may be visited only with a licensed naturalist guide, in groups of at most sixteen, on marked trails. Day-tour places are limited and should be booked ahead in high season.

Visiting Galápagos National Park: what you will see

The Galápagos National Park was decreed in 1959, on the centenary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, and covers about 97 per cent of the land area of the archipelago, some 7,990 square kilometres, the rest being the farms and towns of the four inhabited islands, with some thirty thousand residents; around it lies the Galápagos Marine Reserve, 133,000 square kilometres, enlarged in 2022 by a further sixty thousand. The islands were the first site ever inscribed on the World Heritage list, in 1978. They are the summits of volcanoes that have risen from the sea floor over a hotspot in the last four or five million years, the oldest, Española and San Cristóbal, in the east, the youngest and still violently active, Isabela and Fernandina, in the west; they were never joined to the continent, and everything that lives on them arrived by air or by sea and evolved in isolation, bathed by three ocean currents, one of them cold enough to allow penguins on the equator.

Charles Darwin spent five weeks here in 1835 as naturalist of HMS Beagle, and the mockingbirds, finches and tortoises he collected, differing from island to island, fed the argument he published twenty-four years later. The animals' famous indifference to people is the thing visitors never forget: sea lions asleep on the town benches, marine iguanas, the only seagoing lizards in the world, piled on the black lava, blue-footed boobies dancing beside the path, waved albatrosses on Española, the only tropical albatross, flightless cormorants and Galápagos penguins on Fernandina and Isabela, frigatebirds inflating their red throat pouches on North Seymour, land iguanas, lava lizards, Sally Lightfoot crabs, and the giant tortoises, of which some fifteen species evolved and twelve survive, grazing wild in the green highlands of Santa Cruz and bred in captivity at the Charles Darwin Research Station, where Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta island tortoises, died in 2012. In the water are green turtles, rays, whitetip and hammerhead sharks, and whale sharks at Darwin and Wolf. Introduced goats, rats, blackberry and a parasitic fly are the park's enemies.

Galápagos National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The islands are a year-round destination with two seasons. From December or January to May it is warm and wet: air temperatures of 26 to 30 degrees, short, heavy showers, calm, clear seas at 24 to 27 degrees, green hills, sea turtles nesting, land birds breeding and the best snorkelling conditions.

From June to November it is cool and dry, under the influence of the Humboldt current: overcast skies with a fine drizzle, the garúa, in the highlands, rougher seas and water as cold as 18 to 20 degrees, which calls for a wetsuit, and also the most active marine life, with seabird colonies at their busiest, albatrosses on Española from April to December, and whale sharks in the far north. Peak periods are mid-June to early September and mid-December to mid-January. Allow a week. Quito and Guayaquil are the mainland gateways, and a day or two there guards against missed flights.