Damned with us and damned without us, the Galápagos continue to attract hordes of nature-loving visitors. But whether you're drawn by the majesty of Darwin's discoveries or mesmerized by the brutal spectacle of survival, remember this: Evolution happens.

By Caroline Fraser

Tui De Roy

Land of the lost: a giant tortoise on his way to a steam bath on Alcedo Volcano, Isabela Island

THE FLIGHT FROM MIAMI TO Guayaquil, Ecuador, is packed with tourists headed to the Galápagos and elegantly dressed Ecuadorans returning from shopping trips. Judging by these passengers, Ecuador looks to be a thriving capitalist society. The woman sitting next to me, who's going back home to the southern city of Cuenca with her teenage daughter, asks me to help them force a heavy plastic bucket under the seat. I ask what's in it: tokens for video games.

But Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador and the jumping-off point for the Galápagos, presents a different picture. Even at midnight, the airport is bustling with customs officials and armed officers wearing ornate uniforms. The entrance to the Guayaquil Hilton Colón, an echoing monument to architectural excess, is guarded by private security wielding short-barreled automatic weapons. The glass wall of my hotel room looks down on blocks of razed shacks. When I get up at 5:30 the next morning to catch a flight to the Galápagos, I look out and see one inhabitant taking a leak against the leaning wall of his home, a structure that could have fit into one of the Hilton's vast bathrooms. A sentiment reinforcing the prevailing mood is spray-painted on the wall of a construction site near the Hilton: fuera yankees asesinos—viva colombia insurgente (Get out, Yankee murderers—Long live the Colombian Insurgency).

Guayaquil is a port city on the Pacific, and if I could look across 600 miles of open ocean from the Hilton's window, I would see the Galápagos: 15 islands and a few dozen rocks. In 1832, when the islands were officially annexed, Ecuador was the only country that wanted them. Spain turned up its nose in the 16th century, and around the same time an English sea captain concurred, saying that the islands "are desert and beare no fruite." Everyone subsequently changed their minds. Over the last 150 years, both England and the United States have tried to buy or lease the islands, recognizing their strategic military importance in the Pacific. But Ecuador hung on to them and is glad it did. The Galápagos are now its top tourist attraction and bring in over $100 million annually.

But the boom in the islands has come during a bust for the country as a whole. Ecuador, said to have one of the ten most corrupt governments in the world, is in dire economic and political straits. In 1999, after an El Niño year that devastated coastal areas and the Galápagos, as well as an eruption scare from the Guagua Pichincha volcano, which spread ash all over Quito, Ecuador defaulted on its foreign loans, and a bloodless coup in early 2000 installed the country's sixth leader (Gustavo Noboa) in four years. Violent crime aimed at foreigners and wealthy Ecuadorans has skyrocketed, including the kidnapping in October 2000 of ten foreign oil workers, five of them Americans, in the northeastern jungle. (By early November, two French captives had escaped, and the other eight were still being held.) Due to its crime rate, Guayaquil has been under a state of emergency off and on since 1999, contributing to an incendiary and unstable atmosphere that's obvious the minute one steps off the plane.

None of this appears to have stopped the tourists from coming to the Galápagos. A national park since 1959 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the islands began attracting a few thousand visitors in the 1960s and now draw more than 60,000 tourists annually, most on package tours. The presence of so many tourists, along with the success of the fishing industry in the region, has created a boomtown atmosphere there, attracting some 17,000 permanent residents—fishermen, farmers, park personnel—as word has spread that the islands boast Ecuador's highest standard of living. By necessity, to protect the fragile islands and famously tame wildlife, the archipelago is one of the most tightly controlled ecotourist destinations on earth: an antiadventure for the adventuresome. Licensed park guides watch your every step to make sure you don't trample an iguana nesting area or crush a bird's nest. And though we tourists make almost no direct impact, leaving, as the cliché goes, only footprints, our indirect impact is enormous. With our dollars and voracious needs for comfortable beds and gourmet meals, we're attracting hundreds of people to serve us. And we come bearing with us, in the bellies of the 727s that now fly out to the islands every day, untold introduced species--spores, insects, molds, scales, vines, viruses--that attack and destroy the very world we've come to treasure. Economically, tourists are the salvation of the Galápagos; ecologically, we're kudzu.

Never hospitable to Homo sapiens and crisscrossed with enough bizarre stories of human mayhem, starvation, cannibalism, and murder to prove it, the Galápagos still have one thing to teach us, with all the subtlety of a baseball bat to the back of the head: Evolution's a bitch. And we keep not learning it.