Galápagos Islands

The Galápagos Islands is a part of the Republic of Ecuador

The Galápagos Islands and their surrounding waters form the Galápagos Province of Ecuador, the Galápagos National Park, and the Galápagos

Marine Reserve. The principal language on the islands is Spanish. The islands have a population of slightly over 25,000.

The first recorded visit to the islands happened by chance in 1535, when Fray Tomás de Berlanga, the Bishop of Panamá, was surprised with

this undiscovered land during a voyage to Peru to arbitrate in a dispute between Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro. De Berlanga

eventually returned to the Spanish Empire and described the conditions of the islands and the animals that inhabited them. The group of

islands was shown and named in Abraham Ortelius's atlas published in 1570. The first crude map of the islands was made in 1684 by the

buccaneer Ambrose Cowley, who named the individual islands after some of his fellow pirates or after British royalty and noblemen.

These names were used in the authoritative navigation charts of the islands prepared during the Beagle survey under captain Robert FitzRoy,

and in Darwin's popular book The Voyage of the Beagle. The new Republic of Ecuador took the islands from Spanish ownership in 1832, and

subsequently gave them official Spanish names. The older names remained in use in English-language publications, including Herman

Melville's The Encantadas of 1854.