Galápagos

What it means

The Galápagos Islands lie in the Pacific Ocean, almost a thousand kilometres off the coast of Ecuador, and have never been joined to a continent. That remoteness explains their huge proportion of endemic species, such as the giant tortoises, the marine iguanas, and the mockingbirds and finches whose differences from island to island helped Charles Darwin, who visited them in 1835, to develop his theory of evolution by natural selection. They are a national park and a marine reserve, and have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1978.