Floreana Island

Floreana has the longest human history in Galapagos and the strangest. Whalers set up a barrel at Post Office Bay in the eighteenth century where ships left letters for others to carry home, a system that still works: visitors leave postcards and take any they can hand-deliver. In the 1930s a handful of European settlers arrived, including a self-styled baroness, and within a few years several were dead or vanished in a case never resolved. Today about a hundred people live here. Punta Cormorant has a flamingo lagoon and a green-tinted olivine beach, Devil's Crown offshore is one of the best snorkel sites in the islands, and the highlands hold pirate caves.

History

With its fresh water and flat ground, Floreana, then called Charles Island, was a favourite stop for whalers, and the first known permanent resident of the Galápagos, Patrick Watkins, lived here from 1807 to 1809 by hunting, farming and trading with them. In 1820 a prank by a helmsman of the Nantucket whaler Essex set the island on fire at the height of the dry season, a blaze thought to have helped wipe out some of its species, and in September 1835 HMS Beagle brought Charles Darwin here, where he was told at the prison colony that tortoise shells differed from island to island. In 1929 Friedrich Ritter and Dore Strauch came from Berlin to settle, followed in 1932 by Heinz and Margret Wittmer, whose son Rolf was the first person known to have been born in the Galápagos, and later that year by the self-styled Baroness Eloise von Wagner Bosquet and her companions (Wikipedia, Floreana Island).

What you'll find

• The Post Office Bay barrel - letters left and hand-delivered since the whalers.
• Devil's Crown - a sunken cone rated among the best snorkelling in the islands.
• The olivine beach and flamingo lagoon - the green sand at Punta Cormorant.
• The 1930s settler mystery - the disappearances never explained.

When to go

Year round; calmer seas December to May. A day trip from Santa Cruz, or overnight to see the highlands properly. Devil's Crown has strong currents and is not always workable.

Good to know

The day trip involves four hours of boat for a few hours ashore. Devil's Crown currents are strong and trips are cancelled when conditions are poor. The village is tiny with minimal services. Post Office Bay itself is a barrel on a beach and underwhelms some.

Nearby

Santa Cruz is north-east; Espanola lies east.

Key facts