Puerto Ayora Galapagos is a small town located on the island of Santa Cruz, part of the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. It’s a popular destination for tourists due to its proximity to wildlife, including giant tortoises, sea lions, and iguanas. The town has a variety of restaurants, shops, and accommodations, making it a convenient base for exploring the rest of the island. Visitors can take a boat tour to nearby islands, hike through the highlands to see tortoises in their natural habitat, or simply relax on one of the town’s beaches.
This town, the largest in terms of population and size in the Galápagos, is a surprise to most visitors, who don’t expect to find anything but plants and animals on the islands. Puerto Ayora looks and feels like a fairly prosperous mainland Ecuadorian coastal town, despite the sea lions and pelicans hanging around the waterfront. Most of the hotels, restaurants and tourist facilities line Avenida Charles Darwin, and the airport is on Isla Baltra, around an hour away to the north. Several blocks inland, travel agencies give way to ordinary, humble dwellings and shops. Some descendants of the handful of Norwegian, Swiss and German families that originally settled here four generations ago maintain a presence in the tourism industry.
Volcanic activity has long since ceased on Santa Cruz, the second largest of the Galápagos Islands and located in the center of the archipelago. The name Santa Cruz is Spanish for “Holy Cross,” but its English name — Indefatigable — was named for the British vessel HMS Indefatigable. Santa Cruz has a long history of human settlement and agriculture, which has left the landscape permanently altered by invasive species. Human development began in the 20th century on Santa Cruz when settlers from the United States and Europe moved to the area between WWI and WWII. The variety of geology, wildlife, and vegetation attracted settlers. The small towns of Bellavista and Santa Rosa were established in the humid highlands, where farmers raised cattle and planted crops such as avocados, coffee, sugarcane, bananas, oranges, and lemons.
Today, Santa Cruz is the main tourism hub for all of Galápagos, given its proximity to the airport on Baltra to the north. It is the only island in Galápagos where tourists can readily experience the interior and higher elevations of a Galápagos island. Santa Cruz has the longest paved road in Galápagos, which runs north-south across the island, taking people from the airport ferry at Itabaca Canal on the north coast into the highlands and through a few smaller towns on its way down to Puerto Ayora, the island’s largest city located on the southern coast of the island in Academy Bay.
