Ecotourism is central to everything on the 17 islands of the Galápagos National Park – the airport is made from mostly recycled materials and runs on wind and solar power, and each municipality has a strict sustainability plan. Even 200 years after Darwin’s journey on the HMS Beagle, visitors continue to be astonished by the archipelago’s stunning diversity. It was reformatted, updated and republished in 2017. Editors note: This article was previously published in 2012.

You’ll find blue-footed boobies performing cartoonish mating dances, creeping colonies of iguanas, penguins zooming underwater, and fur seals lounging on volcanic rocks. The nearest city is Irkutsk, about 120 kilometers north of the Mongolian border. The process is more obvious here than elsewhere on Earth, since animals that otherwise look alike diverge subtly from island to island, depending on their environment. The islands are famed, of course, as the place where Charles Darwin developed his ideas on evolution by natural selection. See the islands that changed the course of science – the Galápagos A thousand kilometres from mainland South America, life on the Galápagos follows different rules.

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