Galapagos Islands History

Mar 12
19:20

2007

Eric Castro

Eric Castro

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The Galapagos Islands have a wide history that includes pirates, whalers, and hunters of seals and also love and mystery. Many things happen in these incredible Islands.

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TheGalapagos Islands have a wide history that includes pirates,Galapagos Islands History Articles whalers, and hunters of seals and also love and mystery (it looks for the history of the island Floreana, and read the book Floreana of Margaret Wittmer). Like it has happened with almost all the greatness in the world, the discovery of the archipelago was an accident that it happened while Thomas de Berlanga, bishop from Panama, navigated from Panama to Peru. The king Carlos V of Spain was informed of the enormous turtles with seat form of mounting in the archipelago, and starting from there they received its name.

During the XVIII and XIX centuries, the Industrial Revolution changed the matter necessities it prevails of the Spanish crown, displacing the gold for the oil that was extracted of the whale fat. A hundred years of water and earth exploitation took turtles, whales and seals to the extinction danger. Today, in the islands you will be able to notice that the seals hesitate to come closer to the multitudes, the same as other animals: they have evolved and learned the fear.

The most famous visitor in the Galapagos has been probably Charles Darwin. In 1835 he visited the islands to study it's flora and fauna, and it concluded that, to survive, the species suffer gradual alterations based on the environmental conditions. In 1859, after 20 years of gathering evidence to support their theories, Darwin published The Origin of the Species for Natural Selection.

Ecuador claimed the Galapagos Islands in 1832, and the United States and Great Britain they were disputed its control during the subsequent a hundred years. Surprisingly, it was not but up to 1959 that the islands were named National Park. The tourism began in 1960.

In 1978, the Galapagos Islands were declared Patrimony of the Humanity by the UNESCO, emphasizing their universal value. Today, approximately 70,000 people visit them every year.

"When I see these islands, so near one of the other one, possessed by a scarce reservation of animals, occupied by these birds that differ lightly in their structure but that they fill the same space in the Nature, I should suspect that varieties exist... if the most minimum foundation exists for these observations, it is worthwhile that the zoology of the archipelagos is examined, since such facts would question the stability of the species" - Darwin

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