Around the year 1465 the Inca emperor Tupac Yupanqui would have discovered the islands in one of his numerous travels and not only the Galapagos Islands but also the Easter Islands, even crossing the Atlantic to Oceania.
But it was not until 1535 that Tomás de Berlanga, sent by King Carlos V during the viceroyalty of New Spain and in charge of Inca gold, discovered them. The islands were considered by Berlanga as a cold and arid place so infertile that God had rained stones on it, however he noticed the large number of turtles, seals and finches, species that would later reveal his great secret.
By the end of the XIX century, Spain had retained the greatest amount of European wealth and monopolized the expeditions to America, which brought piracy and privateering. Pirates used the islands as a refuge and destination for many of the treasures of the Spanish Viceroyalty. One of these cases occurred aboard the ship Dear Mary by Captain Jack Thompson taking with him a life-size virgin.
During the 19th century, piracy began to decline and whaling began to turn a profit, decreasing the number of whales as well as 15,000 giant tortoises that were eaten by pirates and conquerors.
In 1835 Darwin became the official naturalist of H.M.S Beagle and that trip would be the starting point to formulate one of the theories that would cause more social, scientific and religious commotion. As a result of this observation in the different islands, Darwin could see how different species had adapted to the environment and transmitted those characteristics to their descendants, reaching the conclusion that the best adapted specimens would survive, he called this adaptation Natural Selection.
Darwin wondered if these biological changes occurred in all living beings, including human beings, and if their origin was evolutionary as in the rest of the species, a theory that was radically opposed to the already established the creationist.
After 20 years working on his theory of evolution, Darwin finally published his work, The Origin of Species, knowing that another naturalist, Alfred Russell Wallace, had quickly reached the same conclusion in the Malay Archipelago, obtaining the same results. Species change due to their environment and those characteristics are inherited preventing the species from disappearing.
The Galapagos Islands, a place that time preserved taking care of the most precious gift, life in its different forms, a paradise that waited to be discovered.
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