Galapagos

The Galapagos Islands sit some 600 miles off Ecuador’s coast, and their isolation is exactly why Charles Darwin found the wildlife here impossible to ignore. Giant tortoises, some living well over a century, share the islands with marine iguanas, blue-footed boobies and sea lions that show almost no fear of people, a legacy of evolving with so few natural predators. Most visits combine a handful of islands by boat or short flight, since each one supports noticeably different species. It remains one of the very few places where wildlife encounters happen this close, and this consistently.