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The 19 islands and hundreds of islets of the Galapagos straddle the equator, almost 600 miles off the Pacific coast of Ecuador at their nearest point. The total landmass of the islands is almost 5,000 square miles, though much of it extremely isolated and uninhabitable (the total population is a mere … more 30,000, with a fluctuating number of tourists). Spread out over 28,000 square miles, each of the small spits of land holds creatures found only in the chain and sometimes endemic to just a single island. The isolation of the islands has allowed the animals here to develop in ways unlike anywhere else in the world, which inspired a young Charles Darwin, who visited in 1835, to write his Theory of Evolution.
