Bucket-List Travel: Why You Need To Go To The Galapagos Now

23.04.2024 - 06:21 / forbes.com

The Galapagos is an enchanted place, and it has stayed that way largely because it has been protected. Several islands in the remote volcanic archipelago remain as pristine as they were well before Charles Darwin first visited in 1835.

But for how long? With nature tourism surging since the pandemic, it’s not surprising that the Galapagos, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, is now at the top of everyone’s bucket list. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTCC), wildlife is now the primary motivator for travelers who want to experience nature. Where better to see it than the Galapagos Islands?

However, the rise in tourism in the Galapagos is putting a strain on resources the Islands can provide such as fresh water, electricity (provided by diesel-run generators), food and transportation. With so many travelers wanting to visit the Galapagos—and they should—how is this sustainable? What needs to happen right now to protect the people and wildlife of the Galapagos, so that we can all enjoy it for years to come?

According to Dolores Gangotena, co-founder of Quasar Expeditions, a pioneer in responsible and regenerative tourism with her husband, Eduardo Diez, “The number of tourists the Galapagos receives–300,000 in 2023–is not sustainable,” she says. “Every year I see more people living in the Islands, more hotels being built, more cars, more motorcycles, and even more dogs, which also pose a threat to the fragile ecoystem,” she continues.

The Galapagos is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and National Park managed by the Galapagos National Park Service, the Charles Darwin Research Center and the Ecuadorian government. For the past 12 years, the Charles Darwin Foundation has warned about the need to monitor the human capacity of the islands. If strained much further, it could cause an extreme threat to everything that makes Galapagos such a draw to begin with, according to Gangotena. “Change needs to happen, and it needs to happen now,” she says.

Gangotena first visited the Galapagos in 1969 on a school trip, and the experience was life-changing. Her love of nature and passion to preserve it inspired her to launch Quasar Expeditions in 1986. The mission was simple: “to share nature with the world in order to protect it, and keep the destinations as pristine as we found them,” she says. When Gangotena and Diez founded Quasar—now a family business, with their sons—they were the first small-boat luxury cruise company in the Islands, and they have been leaders in sustainable tourism ever since.

An outspoken advocate for conservation in the Galapagos, Gangotena says that unless oversight tightens up and the footprint slows down, she is worried for the future of the Islands. “People using the resources