Experience the best of Floreana

Floreana is a small island in the south of the Galápagos, home to fewer than two hundred people, in the village of Puerto Velasco Ibarra. It was one of the first islands settled, and in the 1930s a group of odd arrivals landed here, among them a German doctor, a self-styled baroness and her companions, and the Wittmer family, whose story of rivalry and disappearances is still told. Charles Darwin visited in 1835.

At Post Office Bay, a barrel has served as an informal mailbox since the late eighteenth century, when whalers left letters for passing ships to carry home. Visitors still leave postcards and take those addressed near their own homes. Punta Cormorant has a lagoon with flamingos and a beach of green olivine sand, and the Devil's Crown, the rim of a sunken volcanic cone offshore, is a snorkelling site.

Meals in the village are simple and built on the day's catch and fresh fruit. Giant tortoises roam the highlands, where a spring once supplied the settlers, and the sea is warmest from December to May.