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Galápagos Islands
| Site number: | 1 |
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| Type of site: | Natural | |
| Date of Inscription: | 1978, 2001 | |
| Location: | South America, Ecuador, Cantons: San Cristobal, Santa Cruz and Isabela, Province of Galapagos | |
| Video: |
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NHK World Heritage 100 seriesUp to 75 images are shown here. Click on each for more details or on Image Gallery for more images.
Six official UN languages:
Arabic,
Chinese,
English,
French,
Russian,
Spanish
Other languages: Afrikaans, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Marathi, Norwegian-bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh, Low German
Other languages: Afrikaans, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Marathi, Norwegian-bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh, Low German
| Description: | These nineteen islands (located in the Pacific Ocean a 1,000 km from the South American continent) and their surrounding marine reserve are known as a unique 'living museum and showcase of evolution'. The Galapagos, which are situated at the meeting place of three ocean currents, are a 'melting pot' of marine species. The constant seismic and volcanic activity imitates the processes, which created the islands. These processes, as well as the islands’ extreme isolation, were the reasons for the development of unusual animal life - for instance the land iguana, the giant tortoise and the various types of finch – which in turn inspired Charles Darwin’s, after visiting in 1835, theory of evolution. --WHMNet paraphrase from the description at WHC Site, where additional information is available. | |
| The Galápagos Islands (Official name: Archipiélago de Colón; other Spanish names: Islas de Colónumio or Islas Galápagos, from galápago, "saddle"—after the shells of saddlebacked Galápagos tortoises) are an archipelago of volcanic islands distributed around the equator, 965 kilometres (about 600 miles) west of continental Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean Coordinates: 0°40′S, 90°33′W. The Galápagos archipelago, with a population of around 30,000, is a province of Ecuador, a country in northwestern South America, and the islands are all part of Ecuador's national park system. The main language on the islands is Spanish. They are famed for their vast number of endemic species and the studies by Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle that contributed to the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. --Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. | ||
| Source: | http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1 | |
| Source2: | http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1/video | |
| Reference: | 1. UNESCO World Heritage Center, Site Page. | |