Galápagos Islands

The Galápagos Islands are an archipelago of volcanic islands distributed on either side of the Equator in the Pacific Ocean, nine hundred and six kilometers (five hundred and sixty-three miles) west of continental Ecuador, of which they are a part.The Galápagos Islands and their surrounding waters form the Galápagos Province of Ecuador, the Galápagos National Park, and the Galápagos Marine Reserve.

The principal language on the islands is Spanish.

The islands have a population of slightly over twenty-five thousand.The islands are famed for their vast number of endemic species and were studied by Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle.

His observations and collections contributed to the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.The first recorded visit to the islands happens by chance in 1535, when the Bishop of Panamá Fray Tomás de Berlanga goes to Peru to arbitrate in a dispute between Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro.

De Berlanga is blown off course, though he eventually returns to the Spanish Empire and describes the conditions of the islands and the animals that inhabit them.

The group of islands is shown and named in Abraham Ortelius's atlas published in 1570.

The first crude map of the islands is made in 1684 by the buccaneer Ambrose Cowley, who names the individual islands after some of his fellow pirates or after British royalty and noblemen.

These names are used in the authoritative navigation charts of the islands prepared during the Beagle survey under captain Robert Fitzroy, and in Darwin's popular book The Voyage of the Beagle.

The new Republic of Ecuador takes the islands from Spanish ownership in 1832, and subsequently gives them official Spanish names.

The older names remained in use in English language publications, including Herman Melville's The Encantadas of 1854.