- [David] Ecuador is one of South America's smaller nations.

Its capital is Quito, high in the Andes, with a strong indigenous tradition.

One of its provinces, or states, is the Galapagos Islands.

(upbeat music) People are relative newcomers here.

(soothing music) - [Announcer] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

(soothing music) Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

(soothing music) (bright music) - To get to the Galapagos Islands, the traveler usually stops first in Quito, the capital city of Ecuador.

It's on the west slope of the Andes, at about 9,350 feet.

And it still has strong colonial and indigenous roots.

(bright pan flute music) People have been living in the Quito area for thousands of years.

They have been farming and actually mining precious gems.

The Spaniards, about 500 years ago, found this was an ideal place for them to create their capital as well.

They constructed a city using the wealth and riches they extracted from the local people and the local mines.

The center of the city of Quito was one of the colonial architectural treasures of the world.

It's a place you can walk around and see most of it.

(upbeat music) (speaking foreign language) - [Interpreter] I am wearing traditional clothing from Otavalo.

(speaking foreign language) or sandals, woven belt, embroidered blouse and gold bead necklace.

- People from the countryside, who speak Quechua who are indigenous people come here bringing some of their original works which they have made and now adapted to tourism.

- [Interpreter] I sell scarves, blouses, sweaters, blankets and bags.

- There's a variety of textiles, of hats, of leather goods that we can't even conceive in the United States, all in one small area here.

In the middle of the city.

(bright pan flute music) (speaking foreign language) - [Interpreter] We are Otavalanos.

And we speak Quechua like our ancestors.

(speaking foreign language) (bright pan flute music) - When I come to the plaza, I see the mixture of cultures, and I see the beginning of such an important history for the Americas.

Quito was always under dispute by many cultures.

Precisely because of its location, geographically speaking.

So Quito was very important for every culture, including the Spanish people that arrived.

When the Spanish people arrived, it was 1534.

This was the flattest part of town.

Right instead of that monument of independence that we have over there, there was located a totem pole.

That totem pole was put in by the locals, the natives, 3,000 years before.

The idea was to adore the most important god, that was the sun.

When the Spanish people arrived, they burn it, they destroyed it, and the very first Spanish building that was here, it was a bullfight ring.

Why the bullfight ring?

Because as the Romans had the Coliseum, the Spanish people were doing with the bullfight ring.

- [David] Quito is the capital.

And Quito is the political center of the country as well.

So when Ecuadorians come here, they know that they're in the Washington, DC of their country.

- On top of the building, we have the Ecuadorian flag.

You can see that this flag has the yellow, blue and red colors.

These are exactly the same colors of Venezuela and the same colors of the Colombian flag.

From 1822 to 1830, we were part of a bigger country, area, region, that was called the Great Colombia.

- Downtown Quito was like every other city in colonial America that was founded by Spain.

One side would find, as you'd find here, the presidential center, the position of power of the government.

In another place, you would find the chief magistrates, the judiciary, the people who implemented the laws.

On the third side, you would always find the place where the bishop and all his staff lived.

And then you would have the cathedral, which is the place where the bishop operates.

It's the same everywhere in Latin America.

That order was established by dictates of the King of Spain.

- This is Independence monument right over here.

It's a monument that has a lot of meaning and symbols, in order to understand better where you are.

The first thing that you are going to see there is it says to the heroes August 10th, 1809.

It took us practically 12 years to get rid of the Spanish guys.

So she's on top of it, showing us liberty.

Then we have the condor.

That condor is the national bird of Ecuador.

And the claws are reaping the chain of the Spanish oppression, that's the meaning of that symbol.

- In 1832, Ecuador annexed the Galapagos Islands.

They are now a part of Ecuador.

They are a province of Ecuador equal to over province.

Nobody else wanted them, and fortunately for us and the rest of the world, Charles Darwin had visited them at pretty much the same time.

And his observations, along with the acquisition of the islands by Ecuador, made for a great future for the Galapagos.

The Galapagos lie nearly 900 miles west of Quito.

The plane lands in the Galapagos on Baltra Island, a tiny flat piece of land just north of the large island of Santa Cruz.

From the airport, we will take a boat to the largest town in the Galapagos, Puerto Ayora.

(boaters talking indistinctly) If you come to the Galapagos, you can have a semi-luxurious experience.

But there's not a lot of five star hotels and resorts here.

Basically, if you want to get in the water, and you want to be on the lava, that's the story of the Galapagos.

Lava and water.

First you get in the water, then you get on the lava.

All the great creatures you see here are either on the lava or in the water.

- To be a naturalist guide in the Galapagos, you have to have a very specific and specialized training with the Galapagos National Park.

The Galapagos National Park organized with universities that are able to provide the students enough information about the island in terms of geology, wildlife, behavior of the wildlife, botany, and then have the license.

- At the end of the snorkeling place, we'll be able to find sharks.

At the beginning we have different tidal tropical fishes.

Probably rays, if we have lucky, sometimes we have sea lions in there.

At the end of the snorkeling place, we're gonna find the sharks.

- [David] Well my advice is when you get in the water, try not to sink.

The other thing is when you are surrounded by sharks, think of politics and move on.

- We saw some eagle rays.

And some blue-footed boobies.

- We saw some little sharks that don't eat humans.

And we saw the blue-footed booby diving for a fish.

- It was wonderful, delightful.

- It's great out there.

Clear water, you can see the bottom, and you can see the fish.

- Yeah, the crab, what was the name of the crabs?

(men talking over one another) (inspiring music) - This is a Galapagan treehouse.

The stump here that this little house is built on is an Cedrela tree, which is a great lumber tree, but it's an invasive species.

And the National Park Service likes to get rid of them.

It makes a great platform for my little house.

And I can look around from here and see three, four, five of the Galapagos tortoises.

I don't even need my binoculars to see them.

The climate here in the Galapagos is influenced greatly by the cold Humboldt Current.

And six months of the year, the mist comes in in the late afternoon and stays all night and early morning.

And they call it the garua.

It's known everywhere.

It's an interaction of the very cold water of the current and the warm equatorial air.

(cheerful flute music) It's misty here, and that pulse of precipitation helps the grass grow and the tortoises flourish on that grass.

These animals weigh 500 pounds, is not unusual.

And they eat most of the day.

So they produce quite a bit of poop.

And the birds then will gradually work into this.

It will all be recycled into a fertilizer that is part of the ecosystem of the Galapagos.

I'm only allowed to get two meters close to him or her.

I don't know the difference.

That's park rules.

But you can see that he or she is watching me very carefully.

They have nothing to fear.

They will live 200 years, and will weigh up to 800 pounds.

And that's a lot of tortoise.

They were harvested by the thousands by sailors for years and years and years, for decades, for centuries.

That there are any left seems a miracle.

This population is thriving.

(upbeat music) The Galapagos are home to 18 major islands.

The most unusual lava flows are on Santiago Island, a long boat ride to the north.

It's a day trip from Santa Cruz Island.

The story of the Galapagos is really a story of volcanoes.

And volcanoes bring fire and brimstone and death, but they also, in the long run, bring life.

Because of the location in the Pacific in relation to other parts of the world, the Antarctic, Australia, the South Pacific, Central America, they are located in a place where all kinds of life has come together and evolved into forms found nowhere else on earth.

The small volcano behind me, it has been the place where a study of finches has taken place over the last 40 years.

And that study has been about their beaks.

How big they are and how they change when the finches that have those beaks have to eat different kinds of food.

And some of them can't and die.

And some of them can and flourish.

If you want to see what planet Earth looked like billions of years ago, before there were plants, before there were animals, even before there were bacteria, the place to come is the Galapagos.

This particular flow is just a little over 100 years old.

But there is almost nothing living on it.

- There is very few places in the world we can see this kind of a terrain.

Galapagos is one of them.

This is a type of lava we know as pahoehoe lava.

Which means ropy.

- It's like it was extruded from a tube of toothpaste, and it's found in very few places in the world.

Two of them are Hawaii and Galapagos.

The source of this immense field of lava is probably about three miles away.

- [Darwin] This material in the past should be hundreds of kilometers down, so the islands appear on the areas where plumes of molten rock ascended from the outer core of the planet, the inner mantle, hitting the crust and breaking the crust in order to create what you can see here.

- This lava flow is over 100 years old, but you will be hard pressed to find any plants.

Here is one of the two species growing amidst this vast plain of baking volcanic rock.

The temperatures here in the hot season will get over 100 degrees, but on the rock, they'll reach 150 or 160.

When it gets extremely hot, the plant just shuts down.

It doesn't die.

But this plant looks dead, it is not.

It has simply said I'm not gonna work anymore until the temperature goes down and we get a little bit of rain.

This is a living, healthy plant, one of the first to colonize a lava flow.

- I can walk barefoot here.

It's not difficult.

Because the surface of the lava, it is flat, it is kind of smooth.

But okay, try to walk on the kind of jagged lava.

The one which is, you know, called aa (grunts) lava.

So double-A lava means that the surface of the lava it is very sharp.

- [David] You may have heard it said that they're not making any more land, but they are.

This flow created a vast new acreage of land that hadn't existed before.

The ocean may someday take it away, but in the Galapagos, land is constantly being created.

- If we have another volcanic eruption like the one that started in the year of 1898, the two islands are going to join.

That one over there, Bartolome, and Santiago is just gonna be a single island.

- Below me is what's known as the pinnacle of Bartolome.

It is the remnants of a caldera, a massive colossal volcanic explosion that blew out somewhere between 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, a million years ago.

The wind is tearing this place apart.

And most of the caldera has vanished because of the incessant wind and the action of water.

- You see how little by little the landscape is sculptured by the wind, by the action of the sea.

So erosion, it's changing this land, little by little, all the time.

(upbeat music) - Visitors to the Galapagos make a nearly mandatory stop at the Darwin Research Center, which is entirely dedicated to preserving the tortoises on the various islands.

While you are here, you get a perfect introduction to the strange and marvelous plants that are found in the Galapagos.

Prickly pear cacti are found in every state of the United States, some of them mighty tiny.

They're all over the Americas.

But only in the Galapagos do you have them in the form of a true tree, with a trunk you could actually shinny up without danger of getting spines in you.

- Right now, we have two different species of tortoise.

On the right side we have the dome shaped, which like to live on the biggest island, higher than three or 400 meters of altitude.

On the left side, we have a really good example about the saddlebag shelled tortoise, who like to live on the small islands.

Lower than 300 meters of altitude.

Steven Spielberg, he was inspired by the shape of that tortoise to make the ET movie.

- [David] There, of course.

The islands are really named after the tortoises.

Some of the early arrivals from European countries noticed the resemblance of the carapace, the shell, of some of the huge ones to a saddle that they use in Spain, which is called a galapago.

And so the islands became known as the Galapagos Islands.

- It's really critical to try to preserve these, you know, incredible animals.

- I am ecstatic.

These are beautiful creatures.

- This is a lot better than the boat ride.

Although the boat ride was fun for most of the time.

(flute music) - [David] From Santa Cruz Island, it's a 50 mile boat ride to Floreana Island, which has been home to humans for a couple of hundred years.

(speaking foreign language) (cheerful flute music) - Floreana Island is one of the older islands in the Galapagos.

Older is a relative thing, it's about three million years old.

But as old as that is, it still has primarily lava, blocks of lava, everywhere.

As I look across the little bay here, I can see a spot of sand.

It's a favorite place of sea lions.

They call it a lovaria, or a hang out place for sea lions.

- [Darwin] We have the green sea turtles in the Galapagos Islands.

70% of that population around the world are nesting on Galapagos.

And all those white sand beach that we have around Floreana provide a perfect temperature to incubate the eggs.

And this is the area that we may, we may see here we have a lot of lava rocks.

This type of lava rocks we have underwater.

And this is the main habitat for the seaweed, the algaes.

And the algaes are the main food of the sea turtles.

The lifespan is about 150 years old.

When they're born into small beaches like this, they will reach their sexual maturity about 25 years old.

After that, the females go back one time a year to the same place to give birth.

Female sea turtles are considered fertile until 120, 125 years old.

- Paddle boarding with the sea turtles was the highlight of the trip for me.

Seeing the sea turtles swimming under the board and having that vantage point was awesome.

I think Floreana is my favorite so far because it's like going back in time.

And seeing things that are still pristine, in their natural order.

- I think what I liked the most about the Galapagos is the geology.

It is truly amazing.

I've never seen anything like this before.

The black rocks, the black sand.

And of course the animals on the rocks and the sand is just fantastic.

(speaking foreign language) - [Woman] It is marvelous to see the sea turtles and sea lions, to be so close to them.

They are not afraid.

They are.

(speaking foreign language) - These are called marine iguanas, not just because they can swim.

There are other lizards that can swim.

Because they have evolved to live in the ocean, they have to have evolved a way of getting rid of the salt that they accumulate.

They spit it out.

And if you watch them long enough, you will see a jet of salt come out of their nose, and that is the salt they have accumulated and will not kill them the way it would kill us if it were to stay in our bodies.

If there were no other thing in the world that demonstrated the complexity and marvel of evolution, it is the marine iguana of the Galapagos Islands.

(upbeat music) This little vehicle here, which is a very Floreana bus, is called a chiva, which is a word for female goat.

And this is the principal transportation for visitors around Floreana.

We are starting out in the desert.

And I can look and see the volcano up above us.

But here, as we go up higher and higher, then I see the vegetation start to change.

These trees are called the scalesia.

It's a member of the sunflower family that has reached the Galapagos and gone nuts in evolution.

And it's like nowhere else in the world.

We started off in desert, and here we are in this kind of weird cloud forest.

So my friend Claudio from Floreana assures me that the pirate cave is one of the great places in all of Galapagos.

(speaking foreign language) The kitchen in here.

Boy actually, he had a chimney that he dug up here.

(speaking foreign language) - [Interpreter] The first inhabitant to arrive here in 1807 was Patrick Watkins, an Irish pirate.

He was a drunken crew member that the captain left here in Floreana.

He started a small garden, and when other pirates' ships passed by, he traded his garden produce for rum.

He lived here until one day while showing off his garden, he got some visiting pirates drunk, tied them up, and sailed off with their ship, escaping from Floreana.

(speaking foreign language) This spring is what provides water for the colonas, the locals, and the tourists who visit the island.

We have water year round, and because of this spring we are able to sustain the entire population with this water.

When my father arrived here, there were only 11 residents in all of Floreana.

My father had to be the doctor.

We were born in his arms, all of his 12 children.

Everyone asks why he would want to come here, and we would say because of the island's peacefulness and the nature.

- On the mid-part of the volcano we have a flat plateau farms.

In those that flat plateau farms, we have the main organic soil accumulation, which provide rock, plants and mineral with very rich in nutrients that the plants are gonna grow very quickly.

- [Interpreter] We grow all the fresh vegetables, as well as bananas, papayas, seasonal fruit, everything.

Depends on the seasonal rainfall here in Floreana.

(uplifting music) - The Galapagos Islands are a classic example of creation and destruction on our planet earth.

The volcanoes come into existence over this internationally famous hotspot.

They live for a few million years, and gradually the wind comes by, the waves come by, the heat comes by, and they are turned to dust and returned to the ocean.

But on the hotspot, we know that the mantle is always there, ready to produce new volcanic action, and new islands will keep appearing in the Galapagos.

(uplifting music) Join us next time In the Americas with me, David Yetman.

Ecuador is one of South America's smaller nations.

Its capital is Quito, high in the Andes, with a strong indigenous tradition.

One of its provinces or states is the Galapagos Islands.

(upbeat music) People are relative newcomers here.

- [Darwin] When their juveniles are growing with their parents until two years old, after that, they have to find their food by themselves.

If they are female, they can keep with colony normally.

But if they're males, when they start to get adults, the males, they have to make a bachelors colony in another place.

(upbeat music) (inspiring music) (soothing music) - [Announcer] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

(soothing music) Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

(soothing music) (pan flute music) Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from the Southwest Center.

To order, call 1-800-937-8632.

Please mention the episode number and program title.

Please be sure to visit us at intheamericas.com or intheamericas.org.

(bright music)