Six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador, the Galápagos archipelago is tiny. Its nineteen islands and forty-two islets form 3,000 square miles of land in a 50,000 square mile area of the Pacific.

The islands’ ecosystem is one of the most important in the world, and over the last 150 years it has contributed incalculably to our understanding of the origin of life.

On each of these remote islands animals are geographically isolated from each other and have adapted without interbreeding or competing with their continental cousins.

With no instinctive fear of humans, the fauna of the Galápagos return the avid curiosity of the travellers who come to visit them.

In 1835, a young Englishman called Charles Darwin visited the Galápagos. In 1859, he would write that “it was such cases as that of the Galápagos... which chiefly led me to study the origin of species”.

The five short weeks the 26 year-old naturalist spent on the islands would become the basis of his life’s work – the realization that all living things are part of a constantly changing and developing process of evolution.

“Living culture and natural beauty: A new world of discovery.”

Darwin’s great breakthrough was the realisation that environment must inevitably shape fauna and flora over millennia, much as the wind erodes a mountain.

You may not be able to spend five weeks in the Galápagos, but we can offer you an 8 night cruise guaranteed, like Darwin’s, to be the trip of a lifetime...

“Considering the small size of these islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period, geologically recent, the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhere near to that fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on Earth.”

The Origin Of Species (1859)