Once, the islands were crusts of red and black soils, solidified lava, a thousand kilometres from Ecuador, scattered across a slice of the Pacific. They remained there, far from the rest of the world, for hundreds of thousands of years. Over time, decomposed organic matter started to stratify on the rocks, laying the foundations for life. Clinging to driftwood, creatures arrived and remained. The first human colonos set foot on the islands around the 17th century: whalers.

Most of the human settlers, however, came in the sixties from the continental lands. Among them was the great-grandmother of Ina—a fictional name— woman of San Cristobal, who jumped on a ship to leave the firm land forever. This story comes from the words of Ina, from our long conversations in a hut, deep in the heart of El Progreso, picking coffee berries and discussing life in the sacred mist pouring out of the rainforest, candles illuminating the evening like a tale by Sepulveda.

Ina’s great-grandfathers had a farm in what used to be the south of Ecuador. When Peruvian troops won the war, they lost their lands and left, never to return. In 1954, they packed some bags with what they could—not much—and reached Floreana. Floreana was the first human settlement. Today, it flourishes once again, without humans.

The boat would hit the docks once a month, carrying bags of flour, corn cobs, petrol for lamps, medicines, and working tools. Settlers saw the vessel appear like a mirage and welcomed the sound of its horns like church bells on a festive day. For the early inhabitants of the islands, cultivating their crops was crucial, and families exchanged what they needed—a cask of plátano, maduros, a sack of coffee.

The juta bag that had once held potatoes from the Sierra would be sewn into a pair of pants. Three handfuls of salted fish could be swapped for a plucked chicken. From the roots of the first enclave, life spread across the islands to this day.





At the beginning, the galapagueños lived by fishing, chasing after the schools that would approach the isles, drawn by the bountiful Humboldt current and the prosperous life that took shape around it. On land, they cleared stones with their picks, layering leaves and plant matter to build up some soil. As is common on many islands, farmed animals became a fundamental part of the living pantries that provided food. Some of the chanchos, pigs, sailed with the men to the islands, only to escape and become feral. Thus, they were hunted. The same fate befell cats, dogs, and goats. Ships were, once again, the deep, dark womb our species assembled with curved wood and welded metals, the carrier of a new ecology.

Plátano laid in the casks. With it, its nematodes. Black rats clung to the mooring lines. With them came an empire of new microorganisms and ticks. The Galapagos were virgin islands, soaking in the biological species and cultural artifacts that people carried from the continent.

During the fifties and sixties, long before refrigeration made its way there and became accessible, bovine fat was the preserving agent for anything meat, preventing it from rotting in the deep humidity and sunlight of this place. Pork fat and turtle oil were melted in large pots over the burning fires of Scalesia and Burgmania wood, alongside the branches of the Palo Santo tree, with its heavenly smell and pale white bark. Fish, meat, chicken, and beef cuts were then submerged in the boiling mixture, solidified again by the cooling temperatures, frozen in a temporal limbo.

In the past, meat in the Galapagos didn’t only come from what men loaded into the belly of their steel arks, crossing the thousands of kilometers between these islands and continental Ecuador. As on every other Pacific island, sea dwellers shaped their dietary choices to fit the habitat, cooking and metabolizing a wide array of other creatures. Iguanas, during times of famine, and turtles, boiled in seawater, became living meat reservoirs for sailors. Able to survive for a year without food or water, turtles became the living pantry of entire communities of sailors.

An old lady I met while looking for plants brought me to the back of her land, where an archaeological excavation had once been. She showed me a plain section of the hill containing dozens of enormous land turtle shells, stacked one on top of the other in a food waste landfill. "They cooked the meat inside the same shell," she said. Uspide down on the fire, simmering in its own carapax, trasnforming a reptile lineage in metabolic energy for the colonizers. Scattered around were medicine bottles, broken liquor bottles, and cans, dating back to colonizers and scientists from Australia, England, and Spain.

Far from the fascination of Darwin and de Berlanga, the islands were shaped by early capitalism: here, too, sugar cane made its way, when a lord from Ecuador decided to scar the land forever, constructing the first capitalistic hacienda. 
The fertile volcanic soil became a battleground for profit, and the labor of men and beasts transformed the raw wilderness into a production machine. It took a rich Ecuadorian landowner, and the hacienda El Progreso was born in the middle of San Cristobal at the end of the 19th century.





As so,  Darwin’s finches colived with imported laborers - living in isolation, toiling under the sun, soaking up the mist that dripped out of the lingering pacific clouds. Cobos ruled his empire with an iron fist, and a near-feudal system soon controlled the inhabitants, far removed from the ideals of progress he claimed to represent.
The sugar exports grew together with the bald and deforested spots on the head of this sleeping island. On the ships, animal hides oils left the island, together with salted fish, cane alcohol, molasses and tinctorial mosses.  Cobos was slaughtered by his very own workers. 

I’ve been wondering which scars remain of this past on the face of paradise on earth. Here, as on countless other islands, there are scars. Conservation efforts might try to eradicate intruding species for many more decades, and it’s easier on an isolated patch of land like Galapagos are, but here, too, it’s only a way to slow down a process that permeates every land we inhabit.
1500 species of plants, animal and insects have been introduced since the 1535, the date of the official discovery by De Berlanga, bishop of Panama, and this doesn’t even account for the many novel microorganisms that came riding on us, our animals and our infrastructure.