Puerto Ayora

The main town in Galápagos is Puerto Ayora, located on Santa Cruz Island. It’s a friendly, medium-sized town of some 20,000 inhabitants. Most land tours, scuba-diving tours and adventure tours originate and/or are based here.

Visitors intending to arrange cruise tours locally will stay here waiting for availability on boats to open. Virtually every cruise tour makes a day stop here—usually near the half-way point of an eight-day trip or at the extremes of the four or five-day trip—so that visitors can visit the Charles Darwin Research Station and highlands and stock up on medicine, film, batteries, and snacks if supplies were beginning to run low. Since Puerto Ayora caters to tourist activities, visitors can find almost any item unintentionally left behind.

There is a wide assortment of hotels, restaurants, bars, stores, tour agencies, dive shops, internet cafés and phone centers. There is also a post office, airline offices, a basic public hospital, and a hyperbaric chamber.

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Other places nearby Puerto Ayora: The Galapagos, Puerto Villamil, Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, Puerto Velasco Ibarra and San Cristobal.