Galapagos

A volcanic archipelago roughly 1,000 kilometers off the coast of Ecuador, straddling the equator at the meeting point of the cold Humboldt and Cromwell currents and the warm Panama current, a collision that produces an unusual mix of tropical and cold water species side by side. The extreme isolation of the islands produced marine iguanas found nowhere else, giant tortoises for which the archipelago is named, and the finches whose varied beaks helped lead the young naturalist Charles Darwin toward the theory of natural selection following his 1835 visit. Now an Ecuadorian national park and one of the largest marine reserves on Earth, the islands remain a living laboratory for evolutionary biology.