How Long Have People Lived on the Galápagos Islands?

Perched about 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, the Galápagos Islands are famous for giant tortoises, blue-footed boobies and unusual plant life like Scalesia “daisy trees” and cacti that cling to volcanic rock. But one thing the archipelago didn’t have for most of its history was people. For centuries, the islands were visited, mapped and abandoned before anyone managed to call them home. The 2025 movie Eden, which depicts an early, ill-fated attempt to colonize Floreana Island, taps into that long legacy of humans struggling to survive in one of the world’s most unforgiving landscapes.

The first recorded sighting of the Galápagos occurred on March 10, 1535, when Tomás de Berlanga, the bishop of Panama, drifted off course while on a voyage to Peru and arrived at a remote group of volcanic islands. In a letter to King Charles V, Berlanga described the archipelago as so barren that his crew could not “find a drop of water for two days” and so desolate “it seems as if God has rained stones down.” The soil, he added, was “like slag, useless, because it has no power to grow a little grass.” Afterward, the islands began to appear on maps mainly as navigational reference points.

The Galápagos posed enormous challenges to would-be settlers. As Berlanga described, the islands were remote, fresh water was scarce, and the rocky volcanic terrain baked under intense equatorial heat. These conditions made farming, movement and construction difficult. From the 1500s through the mid-1800s, pirates, whalers and seal hunters stopped only long enough to seek temporary shelter or hunt tortoises for food.

The Galápagos’ first known resident was an Irish sailor named Patrick Watkins, who lived on Floreana from 1805 (some sources say 1807) to 1809 and grew vegetables to trade with passing ships. “The appearance of this man, from the accounts I have received of him, was the most dreadful that can be imagined,” U.S. Navy Captain David Porter wrote of Watkins in his Journal of a Cruise made to the Pacific Ocean, “Ragged clothing… his red hair and beard matted, his skin much burnt from constant exposure to the sun, and so wild and savage in his manner and appearance, that he struck every one with horror.”

After Ecuador annexed the islands in 1832, officials briefly established a penal colony on Floreana that same year, but a water shortage caused the settlement to fail. The availability of fresh water on San Cristóbal Island—where Charles Darwin had come ashore in 1835—allowed for the establishment of El Progreso in 1869. The city remains the oldest surviving community in the island chain.

Only a handful of the Galápagos’ 13 major islands have ever supported permanent communities: Floreana, San Cristóbal, Isabela and Santa Cruz. Baltra Island is the most recently inhabited; the United States built an air base there during World War II. Baltra remains home to Ecuadorian military personnel as well as one of the archipelago’s two airports. In the 1930s, people attempted to colonize Santiago Island but ultimately failed.

Today, the archipelago “has a permanent population of around 32,000 and is visited by more than 200,000 tourists each year,” according to the Galapagos Conservation Trust. Santa Cruz, the second largest island behind Isabela, is home to the largest number of people, with about 37 percent of all residents living there. The rest of the archipelago remains uninhabited and protected, preserving the isolation that has shaped its ecosystems for centuries.