Enchanted, Still

I crossed into Ecuador by land in the year 2000, stepping off a bus from Peru with rudimentary Spanish and no real sense of the economic turmoil I had just wandered into. Faces were drawn, conversations hushed. The country was still reeling from the feriado bancario, a sudden suspension of banking operations that triggered bank collapses and hyperinflation. Jamil Mahuad, 41st president, had just been ousted in a coup, and Ecuador had cycled through governments with dizzying speed. By early 2000, the country adopted the U.S. dollar: monetary stability at the cost of economic sovereignty. I was twenty, wide-eyed, and perhaps willfully naïve. My sights were set on somewhere far from the headlines. Or so I imagined.

My sole mission was underwater. And the ocean delivered.  What began as a dive trip became a twenty-year love affair with the Galápagos, and I surrendered willingly.

Schools of hammerhead sharks sliced through the current. Whale sharks drifted through like slow, gentle giants. Tunas bulleted past in silver flashes. Barracudas hovered like sentinels. Curious sea lions pirouetted around us, while mobula and eagle rays emerged from the blue, quiet as apparitions. At cleaning stations, turtles held still for the attentions of tiny, industrious fish. Sometimes the water erupted into the violence and grace of a feeding frenzy: life and death compressed into a single electrifying moment. 

A lucky twist of fate brought me to Darwin’s Arch and Wolf Island, where I spent four unforgettable months guiding dives. Each descent felt like meeting the ocean for the first time all over again. That connection led to something unexpected: an invitation to support the Charles Darwin Foundation as a technical diver, contributing to sea cucumber monitoring in collaboration with the Galápagos National Park and local fishers. On one dive, a pod of pilot whales surrounded us. Their intelligence and gentleness were so palpable that I felt simultaneously like an intruder and an honoured guest. It changed me. It made me want to understand what I had landed in — not just beneath the surface, but across time.

When people picture the Galápagos, they often imagine something suspended outside of time, untouched by human consequence. But these islands have never been outside history; they have been used, altered, inhabited, reimagined, and repeatedly remade. And yet nature here keeps insisting on itself, adapting and returning. That resilience, that quiet refusal to be undone, is what makes their beauty inseparable from their history: from use and damage, yes, but also from protection, and return.

The first official European account came in 1535, when Fray Tomás de Berlanga drifted westward and described a harsh, waterless place that seemed as though God had rained stones. Yet he noted the giant tortoises, so numerous and tame they gave the archipelago its enduring name. Spain ignored the islands entirely: no gold, no populations to govern, no agricultural promise. For a time, that irrelevance was their protection.

It didn't last. Privateers, buccaneers, and whalers turned the Galápagos into a floating pantry: tortoises hauled away as living provisions, fur-bearing animals exploited, species treated as inexhaustible simply because no one had yet calculated the cost. Then Darwin's five weeks ashore in 1835 shifted the terms again. The islands became not only useful but explanatory, a laboratory before they became a homeland. Long before the Galápagos was admired for its fragility, it was valued for what could be taken from it, whether meat, oil, or insight. Living there, I came to understand that this history was not behind us. It was the very ground we were working on.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ecuador sought to make the islands productive. Penal colonies, agricultural schemes, and settler projects all tried to bend volcanic isolation into social purpose. The results were often brutal and unstable. Harsh conditions, scarce freshwater, and distance from the mainland made every attempt at reinvention harder than imagined. The islands, it turned out, had their own terms.

In the interwar years, the Galápagos began attracting a different kind of migrant: people fleeing modernity, romanticizing self-sufficiency, or hoping to start over at the edge of the world. Some arrived with philosophical ambitions, others with grandiose fantasies, and some with enough drama to become legend. The now-famous Floreana murder mystery still lingers in the popular imagination because it revealed something true beneath the spectacle.

The Galápagos is not only ecologically isolated. It is psychologically isolating. It sharpens personality, magnifies tension, and exposes fragility. The romantic ideal of pioneer reinvention collides hard with volcanic terrain, limited water, and the stubborn realities of community. Living there, I came to recognize that isolation does not simplify people; it amplifies them. But the islands are patient. Eventually, you bend. And in bending, you redefine what patience, humility, and flexibility even mean.

The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 altered the strategic map of the Pacific, and during the Second World War the Galápagos became newly important. After Pearl Harbor, the United States established a military base on Baltra in 1942, building the airstrip, docks, and infrastructure that would later help shape the modern visitor experience.

That history still sits beneath contemporary tourism. Many travellers arrive through infrastructure born of war, even if they never notice it. I did not, the first time. Like most visitors, I was looking outward; at the sea, the wildlife, the horizon. With wartime and maritime traffic also came a deepening ecological problem: introduced species. rats, insects, goats, cats, and invasive plants had arrived in waves over time, but increased movement accelerated the disruption.

In an island system shaped by isolation, the consequences were outsized. Ground-nesting birds, tortoise populations, and endemic vegetation all felt the pressure. What had evolved over millions of years could be destabilized in decades. Isolation is what made the Galápagos extraordinary. It is also what makes it fragile.

By the time Ecuador established the Galápagos National Park in 1959, significant ecological damage had already occurred. Protection did not preserve a pristine wilderness; it began the long work of stabilizing an already altered system. It was never about freezing time. It was about deciding, collectively and imperfectly, how to live with consequence. That is what I came to admire most: not the fantasy of untouched nature, but the tenacity of people working inside an altered place and choosing to care anyway.

From the 1960s onward, the resident population grew, towns expanded, and though the inhabited zone remained a fraction of the archipelago, the islands became inseparable from the communities living within them. Conservation became inseparable from livelihoods, fisheries, tourism, and the daily negotiations between residents, park authorities, scientists, operators, and the state.

The Galapagueños I came to know were shaped by hardship and resilience, descended from pirates, pioneers, failed colonists, and society's escapees. Trust does not come easily to foreigners. It was earned slowly, through showing up and listening well; through understanding that affection for a place is not the same as responsibility. But once welcomed in, you become part of a tapestry as rich and nuanced as the ecosystem that surrounds it.

Many of us, introduced species in our own right, were raising children within a tightly woven community of mariners, guides, scientists, conservationists, and dreamers. Isolation here breeds collaboration, and collaboration breeds ingenuity. At the Tomás de Berlanga school, where my 2 children attended until middle school, parents pooled resources year after year to keep doors open, weaving science, field work, and storytelling into lived experience rather than curriculum. Children tagged tortoises and mapped ecosystems. I watched them grow up with a kind of ecological literacy that felt ingrained; a tortoise was not a symbol, a coastline was not scenery — they were home, in the fullest sense of the word.

Environmental stewardship is not taught as a distant ideal. It is lived. Some inherit it by birth, others by devotion, but either way it settles into the body as habit, responsibility, and belonging.

During my years in the archipelago, I witnessed conservation not as slogan but as labour. I saw it in the field, on spreadsheets, in meetings, through tension and compromise, and stubborn hope. I joined a dear friend conducting PhD research in evolutionary biology, weeks of machete-wielding snail-picking, camping in dense brush, our work running parallel to the goat-eradication hunters of Project Isabela. In the years that followed, the eradication work laid the foundation for the bold restoration project that is now underway on Floreana Island.

Species once thought lost are being brought back. Tortoises are being reintroduced to places where none had walked for generations. What restoration looks like, in practice, is not miracle but persistence. None of it is fast nor simple, and all of it requires trust, local knowledge, political will, and the reverence to think in timescales larger than a human life.

What makes the Galápagos extraordinary today is not that it escaped human history. It is that the people within it are consciously responding to it.

Visitor limits, zoning, strict landing protocols, local fisheries regulations, international collaboration: these are not bureaucratic inconveniences. They are the architecture of an experiment in coexistence, negotiated daily between residents, park authorities, scientists, operators, and the state. The results are scrutinized on a world stage, held up as both model and warning.

Living within that ecosystem, both natural and human, shaped me deeply. I wore many hats: diver, guide, collaborator, host, facilitator, mother, advocate. The lines between work and life blurred, all stitched together by the rhythms of the islands. The Galápagos became the community of my heart, one I remain connected to and often find myself yearning for.

I carry the imprint of this place in everything I do. It shapes how I relate to people, to nature, and to change; and to travel itself. In my work with Adventure Canada, I find myself returning to what the Galápagos taught me: that the most meaningful journeys are the ones that catalyze a change in perspective, in how you see, how you listen, and how you return. It reminds me that adaptation is not just a scientific concept. It is a way of life. The challenge is ongoing, and so is the responsibility. So, I have learned, is the capacity to begin again.

Journeys for the Curious