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About 25km northwest of Santa Cruz, SANTIAGO - officially called San Salvador - is the fourth-largest island in the Galapagos at 585 square kilometres, and the last to have been abandoned by human settlers. In the early nineteenth century, Captain Porter is reputed to have set four goats free on the island, which swiftly set about multiplying, within a few decades causing untold damage to the island's native wildlife. Although the goat population has levelled off at 100,000, the National Park's job of finishing off a tiny number of feral pigs here has to be done before they can get to work on the goats. As well as Santiago's four visitor sites, there are some interesting satellite islands, such as Rabida, Bartolome and Sombrero Chino , and its proximity to Santa Cruz means that the majority of boat tours stop somewhere in this area. Day-trip boats based in Baltra occasionally call at Bartolome too. Puerto Egas , in James Bay on the western side of the island, is Santiago's most visited site, good for snorkelling and spotting a healthy cross-section of wildlife. A few derelict buildings of the old port litter the bay, the relics of failed salt-mining operations of the 1920s and 1960s. Hector Egas, the namesake of the port, left three men here to look after the property, vowing to return with more money to rekindle his bankrupt industry. One of his employees waited four years in vain for his boss to return, and became a minor attraction for the early tourists in his own right - the vision of a castaway, with shaggy hair and a long unkempt beard, who scoured the island for food. A trail leads east from the port area to the old salt mine, a crater where flamingos are occasionally spotted. Along the shore to the west, the bay is an expanse of cracked and weathered black basaltic lava, with enough pools and crevices to sustain a wealth of intertidal wildlife. The Sally lightfoot crabs, urchins, anemones, eels and octopuses that you'll see make a handsome smorgasbord for a number of shore birds, herons, oystercatchers, ruddy turnstones and noddy terns among them. At the far western end of the trail, erosion has formed the fur seal grottoes , shimmering turquoise pools and inlets worn into lava tubes by the waves. Natural rock bridges straddle the breaches where marine iguanas, fur seals and marine turtles swim. The sloshing of water in one has earned it the title of "Darwin's Toilet". Behind you, the tuff cone of Pan de Azucar (Sugarloaf) volcano, at 395m, overshadows scrub and acacia trees often used as perches by Galapagos hawks . North of Puerto Egas, on the other side of a lava flow, lies Playa Espumilla , a tawny beach couched in mangroves, favoured by marine turtles as a nesting ground. Feral pigs that dig up and eat turtle eggs have been a serious problem here in the past, but a recovery should come with the completion of the eradication programme. A trail leads inland from the beach, weaving through the mangroves alongside a salty lagoon into thick vegetation, home to Darwin's finches and flycatchers . Many boats cruise by Buccaneer Cove , roughly 8km north of Puerto Egas and a favourite hide-out of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century freebooters looking to careen their boats and stock up on food and water. Fifty-metre tuff cliffs, spattered with guano, taper down to a short, dusky beach and then rise in the north forming pinnacles and spurs. Pre-Columbian pottery shards discovered here led Thor Heyerdahl to suggest that the cove had been used as a campsite by mainland fisherman long before the arrival of the pirates, probably in the wet season when a freshwater stream ran down to the beach. On the eastern side of Santiago, Sulivan Bay , named after Bartholomew James Sulivan, a lieutenant on the Beagle , is one for the lava freaks. A trail leads across a vast, century-old flow of pahoehoe lava, a petrified lake of rumpled ooze, intestinal squiggles and viscous tongues, punctuated by oddities like hornitos , solidified pimples made by bursts of gas, and moulds of tree trunks that vaporized in the heat. The lava field is dominated by two large tuff cones, and in the cracks and crevices you'll see the layers of previous flows beneath. In this barren landscape, the pioneering Mollugo and the lava cactus Brachycereus are the only plants that can eke out life.
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