Galápagos National Park

Declared in 1959, the centenary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, Galápagos National Park protects 97% of the archipelago Charles Darwin visited for five weeks in 1835 aboard HMS Beagle, where his observations of how finches and iguanas varied from island to island proved decisive for his later theory of evolution by natural selection. It was the first natural site ever inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list, in 1978. Its isolation at the meeting of three ocean currents has produced an extremely high level of endemism: some 80% of the land birds, 97% of the reptiles and land mammals and over 30% of the plants exist nowhere else on the planet — the giant tortoise among them, which gave the archipelago its name, galápago being an old Spanish word for tortoise.