Santa Cruz
Another day in Paradise!
As the sun was rising on the horizon and our boat was moving along the coast of Santa Cruz, suddenly our port of arrival was spotted by our eyes – Puerto Ayora! Right away we knew that another great adventure was about to begin.
We started our day half an hour earlier than usual and the main reason was to get the most that we could of Puerto Ayora, with so many places to visit such as the Rearing Center of the National Park (Darwin Research Station), tortoises in the wild, Los Gemelos and of course the town of this port.
We first started our day by visiting the great program of reproducing giant tortoises in captivity, which happens because their environment is severely threatened by introduced animals such as feral goats, cats, and dogs, among others. We started meeting the baby tortoises. Their size was not bigger than our hand. Then we encountered the very large giant tortoises. A lot of us in that moment were wordless. How prehistoric these animals looked! How heavy they were! And there they were, waiting for us, while they were feeding on the juicy elephant ears plant that they were served for breakfast.
After our first activity we walked along the waterfront of Puerto Ayora, searching around in those hundreds of stores for a unique souvenir to take home as a reminder of our trip to Galápagos. This town holds around 18,000 people. Most of them work for tourism. Puerto Ayora is the most inhabited island of the archipelago.
After this little walk of more or less an hour, we headed to the highlands of Santa Cruz where we knew the next part of our adventure was going to be more astonishing than the first one.
Up in the highlands, the giant tortoises were roaming around free on a vast farm, eating grass, passion fruit or just resting in the little ponds that happen to form naturally in that area. So fantastic, it’s true, what a great day we had with those very mysterious animals, the giant tortoises.
