Floreana Island

Floreana's flat ground, fresh water, plants and animals made it a favourite stop for whalers and other ships. More than 200 years ago they set up a wooden barrel at Post Office Bay, so that letters could be collected by ships heading home, mainly to Europe and the United States. The first known resident of the Galápagos, Patrick Watkins, lived here from 1807 to 1809, farming and trading with whalers. In 1820 a prank by a crewman of the Nantucket whaler Essex set the island on fire in the dry season, and the blaze burned out of control. Charles Darwin landed in September 1835, when Ecuador kept a prison colony on the island, and heard that tortoise shells differed from island to island. The island is named after Juan José Flores, Ecuador's first president, during whose presidency Ecuador took possession of the archipelago; English-speaking sailors called it Charles Island.

In 1929 Friedrich Ritter and Dore Strauch came from Berlin to settle, and their letters, widely reported in the press, drew others. Heinz and Margret Wittmer arrived from Germany in 1932 and lived in caves at Asilo de la Paz, where their son Rolf was born in 1933, the first person known to have been born in the Galápagos. Later in 1932 the self-styled Austrian "Baroness" Eloise von Wagner Bosquet arrived with two German companions. A series of disappearances and deaths followed, possibly including murders, and only the Wittmers stayed. The story inspired a Simenon novel, the documentary The Galapagos Affair of 2013 and the film Eden of 2024.

Floreana's identity rests on its history as the oldest-settled island of the archipelago and on its mysteries. The post barrel is its best-known tradition: visitors leave postcards without stamps and sort through the pile for ones addressed near their own homes, to deliver by hand. Margret Wittmer's account of her life here, Floreana: A Woman's Pilgrimage to the Galápagos, and the books and films about the 1930s settlers keep drawing curious travellers.

Like the rest of the Galápagos, the island lives by conservation. Galapagueños are mostly descendants of settlers from mainland Ecuador, joined by a few Europeans, and the calendar follows the mainland's Catholic feasts. Guides trained and licensed by the national park lead visits to most sites, and the rules — keep about two metres from animals, stay on marked paths, take nothing away — are taken seriously.

The island's wildlife has suffered more than most from people. The endemic Floreana tortoise was declared extinct, and the Floreana mockingbird now survives only on the nearby islets of Champion and Gardiner. Restoring what was lost has become part of local life, and the island is recognised as an Important Bird Area, with one of the main colonies of the critically endangered Galápagos petrel.

About 100 people live on Floreana, almost all in Puerto Velasco Ibarra, the one town on the north-west coast. Daily life is small-scale and quiet, tied to the boats that bring visitors, supplies and mail, and to the few places that offer rooms and meals. As across the islands, almost everything else arrives from the mainland by cargo ship, and moving to the Galápagos from the mainland is restricted by law.

The biggest change in recent years has been the restoration project. A programme to eradicate the animals people brought to the island — feral goats, donkeys, cattle, cats and, above all, rats and mice — has been followed by rewilding. By February 2026, 185 selectively bred tortoises carrying much of the ancestry of the extinct Floreana giant tortoise had been released on the island, and the Galápagos crake was rediscovered here in 2025.

As elsewhere in the archipelago, fresh water is scarce and precious, and the pressures of tourism, invasive species and the cost of living are constant concerns for a community that depends on visitors but lives inside a national park.

Floreana eats as the rest of the Galápagos does: mainland Ecuadorian food with a sea-to-table twist. Almost everything except seafood and some highland produce comes by cargo ship from Guayaquil, so the island's few kitchens rely on fish, shrimp and octopus, on what local farms can grow, and on supplies that arrive with the boats. Lobster and fish are the main catch of the islands' fishing fleets.

The islands' staples are ceviche of fish, shrimp or octopus, "cooked" in citrus; fish in coconut sauce; and grilled fresh catch. Spiny lobster, langosta, is served grilled or with garlic in season. Set lunches of soup, rice and a main course follow the mainland almuerzo pattern.

Fresh fruit juices and batidos, blended with milk, are everywhere in the islands, and most beer is shipped in from the mainland. Visitors who stay eat at the handful of places in Puerto Velasco Ibarra, among them the Wittmer family's small hotel.