The Galapagos Islands are a group of 127 islands, 18 of them quite large while only 4 of them are inhabited, on which there are also some hotels. Few people know that these islands were discovered by a priest, Fr Tomas de Berlanga, Bishop of Panama on March 10, 1535. He was born in Berlanga, Spain in 1487, a humble missionary who was asked one day to intervene in a political dispute between the Spanish crown and the indisciplined Francisco Pizarro of Peru. Because of strong currents, the ship he was sailing on lost its course and ended up lost in the Pacific ocean, 1000 kilometers from Ecuador. On that historic day in March 1535, he came across a series of volcanic mountains , a lifeless land with no water, which they desperately needed. As the first European to discover them, he arrived by accident and complained that his crew that went ashore found 'nothing but seals, iguanas, turtles and such big tortoises that each could carry a man on them.' - a description that sounds like PERFECTION to us! Fr Tomas never returned to these islands and never tried to take advantage of his discovery, but reported it to the Spanish Emperor. The Galapagos Islands were ignored for many years until Charles Darwin arrived there in 1835, exactly 300 years after Fr Tomas discovered them, visited these islands and observed the plants and animals of this new land, which later inspired him to develop the Theory of Evolution.
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