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Galapagos Cruises.

Celebrity Cruises.

X is your journey back in time with modern day amenities.

Many destinations promise visitors the chance to "step back into history." The Galapagos Islands perhaps best exemplifies that promise, as we take you to a destination that helped shape one of the world's leading scientific doctrines.

Known as the inspiration for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, this cluster of islands is so isolated that many of its creatures cannot be found anywhere else on Earth. From the giant tortoises to the marine iguanas and finches, the Galapagos islands afford you the chance to observe a living laboratory of adaptation.

The Galápagos Islands are an archipelago of volcanic islands distributed around the equator in the Pacific Ocean, 972 km (525 nmi) west of continental Ecuador, of which they are a part.

The Galápagos Islands and its surrounding waters form an Ecuadorian province, a national park, and a biological marine reserve. The principal language on the islands is Spanish. The islands have a population of around 23,000.

The islands are geologically young and famed for their vast number of endemic species, which were studied by Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle. His observations and collections contributed to the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

The first crude navigation chart of the islands was done by the buccaneer Ambrose Cowley in 1684. He named the individual islands after some of his fellow pirates or after the English noblemen who helped the privateer's cause. More recently, the Ecuadorian government gave most of the islands Spanish names. While the Spanish names are official, many users (especially ecological researchers) continue to use the older English names, particularly as those were the names used when Charles Darwin visited.

Weather

Although located on the Equator, the Humboldt Current brings cold water to the islands, causing frequent drizzles during most of the year. The weather is periodically influenced by the El Niño phenomenon, which brings warmer temperatures and heavy rains.

During the season known as the garua (June to November), the temperature by the sea is 22 °C (72 °F), a steady and cold wind blows from south and southeast, frequent drizzles (garuas) last most of the day, and dense fog conceals the islands. During the warm season (December to May), the average sea and air temperature rises to 25 °C (77 °F), there is no wind at all, there are sporadic, though strong, rains and the sun shines.

Weather changes as altitude increases in the large islands. Temperature decreases gradually with altitude, while precipitation increases due to the condensation of moisture in clouds on the slopes. There is a large range in precipitation from one place to another, not only with altitude, but also depending on the location of the islands, and also with the seasons.

The following table corresponding to the wet 1969 shows the variation of precipitation in different places of Santa Cruz Island: