In the Galápagos Islands, a fragile archipelago off the coast of Ecuador, everyone seems to know Alicia Ayala.
“They call me the queen of Airbnb,” she said after greeting diners with kisses and selfies at 1835, a restaurant named after the year Charles Darwin visited these islands and dreamed up the theory of evolution.
Since the pandemic, hundreds of Galapagueños are taking her cue, renting out their rooms for as little as $8 a night.
Ms. Ayala, 58, explains her business model: The Galápagos aren’t just for elites anymore. Renting her three Puerto Ayora apartments on Santa Cruz Island for $120 a night offers American budget travelers, European backpackers and Ecuadorean families “an affordable way” to visit a place that’s long catered to the rich, she says.
The promise of Airbnb, which was founded in 2007, has always been that. But across the globe, its success has sometimes given rise to unwelcome hordes of tourists. Tensions between Airbnb and communities have become common in recent years, from Barcelona to Beverly Hills, with criticism of rent increases for locals and environmental damage from crowds.
But advocates for the Galápagos, a province of Ecuador, say overtourism is especially harmful there. After all, where else does a community include sea lions sleeping at bus stops and birds so tame you can touch them?
In Puerto Ayora, the lone blip of civilization in the mostly uninhabited Galápagos, coffee shops now serve matcha, and waterfront cafes catering to tourists offer freshly caught (endangered) tuna. One recent morning on a white sand beach packed with tourists, close to the famed Charles Darwin Research Station, a 20-something Ecuadorean in his underwear poked at crabs with a stick and terrorized gulls while his girlfriend snapped selfies.
Hotel owners, naturalists and other critics say the explosion of short-term rentals here alters the very ecosystem that those thousands of visitors have come to see. (Most rentals are posted on Airbnb, but platforms like Vrbo, Booking.com and Expedia are also in the mix.) Many blame these new short-term rentals for attracting travelers who don’t know that 97 percent of this archipelago is a protected national park, and fail to respect wildlife in this UNESCO World Heritage site.
With visitors regularly chasing animals, drinking, and trashing beaches, many residents fear these islands are becoming the overrun Venice of the natural world.
Critics say the short-term rentals are able to fly under the radar and avoid complying with the regulations that keep the islands pristine. In a statement, Airbnb said its Galápagos activity is “compliant with existing regulations,” and added that short-term rentals are “an unregulated category of accommodations in the Galápagos Islands.” Vrbo, Booking.com, and Expedia did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
The rise of short-term rentals has other trickle-down effects, too: budget travelers spend less than traditional tourists, which is challenging for local businesses in a place where the tourism industry employs 80 percent of the Galápagos’s 30,000 residents. (What’s on offer on the rental sides isn’t all budget fare: for about $1,000 a night, a traveler can get an opulent villa perched on a volcano, complete with private chefs and wild giant tortoises.)
“It’s a fragile economy. We have a population that needs infrastructure and income,” said Mateo Estrella, Ecuador’s tourism minister. “We have to find a balance between development and conservancy.”
Nature is worth a fortune here — $275 million in tourism, $110 million in fishing, $36 million in stored carbon from greenhouse gas-trapping plants per year, according to the Central Bank of Ecuador — but it relies on this place being pristine. This is the Galápagos paradox.
Now, hotels and cafes sit half-empty, and even Airbnbs have begun struggling in this crowded market.
The Rise of Eco-Tourism
The Galápagos took millions of years to form 19 islands, all born by lava eruptions. With the continent 600 miles away and no native humans to interfere, it’s easy to see why Darwin found it so special. Each island’s creatures evolved in unique ways: swimming iguanas, giant tortoises, tiny penguins. But the arrival of humans instantly began to change the environment and supercharged the introduction of invasive species that destroy ecosystems — over 1,500 have since arrived since Darwin visited, including berries and opossums.
By the time the national park was established in 1959, UNESCO and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature had already decided that the human impact was unsustainable and the islands were under threat.
The recommended annual tourist limit was set at 12,000 in 1975, but that wasn’t exactly scientific, said Tui De Roy, an author and naturalist whose Belgian family landed here in the 1950s. Ms. De Roy’s husband at the time drew up the park’s master plan for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
“At the time, there were 6,000 tourists visiting every year,” she said. So officials doubled that number. Back then the only way to arrive was by ship, which limited visitors and kept costs high. Commercial flights brought more people by the 1980s and tourism — and the local population — took off.
The rise of Instagram in the 2010s heightened the popularity of the Galápagos even more, and soon, luxury hotels — including a 174-bed resort and a golf course designed by Greg Norman, complete with a stem cell therapy center — were in the works.
Environmental researchers and activists weren’t happy. (At one point, UNESCO placed the islands on the World Heritage in Danger list for a few years.) Growth was so unrestrained that in 2015, the government issued a moratorium curbing all development.
Even that didn’t manage to slow the influx of visitors. Residents started offering day trips, which began to replace the traditional — and expensive — overnight cruise. Instead of park guides leading official tours, a cabdriver or a fisherman might offer a trip to a volcano or a reef. The tourist population exploded once more, now driven by people who couldn’t have previously afforded a trip to the ends of the earth.
Today, there is no limit to the number of visitors allowed, and the islands are on pace for 300,000 this year, which is almost double the amount from 2007, according to El Observatorio de Turismo de Galápagos.
Enter Airbnb
When Covid hit, it all came crumbling down.
Lockdowns effectively ended tourism and crashed an economy dependent on it. For months there were no freighters or planes bringing people or staple foods. Desperate, people traded anything they could for meals. Some even slaughtered and sold tortoises.
As Galapagueños shared ideas on WhatsApp, they realized they might lure tourists back by renting their homes at low prices.
“All we had were our rooms,” said Ms. Ayala, who relocated from Quito 35 years ago, working in a women’s support group and an alternative medicine shop in the before times.
Airbnb had been on the island before the pandemic, but according to the Galápagos Hotel Association, there were only 56 listings in 2015 — and 350 in 2020.
By 2023, the world had restarted and revenge travel boomed. On the Galápagos, it nearly matched prepandemic levels, and now, Airbnb bookings were 50 percent higher than those for hotels, according to the Hotel Association.
Today, no one knows how many rentals there are, not even Ecuador’s government. The islands’ hotel association has documented 1,364 Airbnbs this year compared with about 300 legal hotels, hostels and guest houses.
Ghost hotels have also sprung up: unmarked and unregulated properties that advertise online, turning apartment blocks into hotels (with spas, gyms and uniformed staff).
Residents are happy to have the visitors back, but it’s a fine line. “If there were no tourists, the fishermen would take over and the environment would be gone,” said Fiddi Angermeyer, whose father moved to the islands from Germany with three brothers in 1937, and is a sort of encyclopedia of all things Galapagueño.
But like many businesses, his cruise company is struggling post-pandemic. He blames the new cohort of thrifty visitors.
Bente Schneider always pictured these islands as an idyllic Eden. And that’s what she felt she’d found when she moved here five years ago and began running the Acacia, a hotel where rates are around $200 a night. But these days, bookings are down because of what she calls “unfair competition.”
The seven-room Acacia pays $5,000 a year in operational and environmental permits. This includes strict regulations on everything, even trash disposal and fire exits. Gas, water and other utilities are also more expensive for commercial enterprises like hotels. Airbnbs get a lower residential rate. Hotels like Ms. Schneider’s are also required to make “mandatory contributions supporting conservation” to local institutions, and prove to the government that they employ residents and support Galápagos businesses.
Those rules are in place, Mr. Angermeyer said, because this is a place without sustainable energy or potable water, a place where most sewage drains into the islands’ volcanic rocks or is dumped in the sea. Water contamination is “directly tied to unregulated population growth and tourism,” said Daniel Pauly, a University of British Columbia marine biologist who has studied the islands since 2000.
“Airbnbs don’t have to meet those requirements,” Ms. Schneider said, “and we’re not allowed to add any new rooms or beds because of the law.”
Last year, after a series of face-to-face meetings with local and federal officials failed to spur change to regulations, Ms. Schneider wrote letters to officials and UNESCO begging for help. Nearly 40 local hoteliers co-signed.
“They didn’t respond,” Ms. Schneider said in a pin-drop quiet lobby in July, normally the height of tourist season. Now she’s thinking of getting out of the hotel business.
Are They Legal?
There are several rules that critics say are in tension with the explosion of short-term rentals, including the islands’ Special Law to balance conservation and growth. The national constitution recognizes the rights of nature and gives rivers and animals legal status and specifically mentions protecting Galápagos. And, there are local park rules, along with the environmental permitting that Ms. Schneider and other hotel owners adhere to. (Some small minority of short-term rentals do get permits.) On top of all that, there’s the moratorium on all Galápagos hotel development, yet another rule some argue should apply to Airbnb.
In other words, there are regulations, said Alejandro M. Garro, an adjunct professor of law at Columbia University, who has spent decades advising transnational companies on breach of contract. “Ecuador’s constitution alone gives you all the weapons.”
An Airbnb spokesman, Sam Randall, said in an email that the company “supports the introduction of clear and fair rules on travel that protect the islands’ fragile ecosystems while economically empowering the local community.” Mr. Randall added: “Comprehensive approaches to this challenge cannot only look at accommodations, but the process managed by the Ecuadorean government through which thousands of visitors are permitted to arrive via ship and plane to the Galápagos Islands each year.”
While there is still no law officially banning these rentals, that might change. In 2023, the Tourism Ministry announced what it called a “hotel plan,” in which they promised to work with community leaders and authorities to set new rules.
Details on the plan remain thin. In an interview, Mr. Estrella, the tourism minister, cited the need to “study” the problem “scientifically” before saying how many such accommodations would legally remain, or how he would enforce closing rentals. He is now telling landlords and platforms “to refrain from listing residential properties offering accommodation services, as such activity is illegal,” he said. In June, Mr. Estrella said he had notified more than 100 rentals that they must shut down within 10 days, but admitted he had no clue how many complied. While he said he too was “worried” about long-term impacts on the Galápagos environment, Mr. Estrella also called the movement of tourists from hotels to Airbnb a kind of natural selection.
If officials fail to settle the matter soon, Mr. Garro predicts a wave of lawsuits will force Ecuador’s high courts to take it up.
UNESCO recently ruled that things were moving in the right direction in the Galápagos, and in a statement, the organization said it supported “zero growth,” and “regulation of online travel agencies such as Airbnb and Booking.com, which pose risks to both the conservation of the site and the sustainable management of tourism.”
Alex Cox, who has been a park guide for 35 years, has a daughter studying mechanical engineering in Quito, and a son working in the United States. He knows nature is threatened, but he needs supplemental income. He is considering starting his own Airbnb.
“Why not?” he asked, waiting for tourists at Baltra airport as Darwin’s finches zipped by. “If you pay taxes, register and follow the rules, does an Airbnb really cause that much harm?”
The Enforcement Problem
There are other threats to the Galápagos’s equipoise. Fishing is legal in much of the reserve despite it being a marine protected area (that’s why rare species like scorpionfish are local delicacies). And despite strict rules, illegal fishing like shark poaching is rampant, said Jack Stein Grove, a naturalist who wrote the first major guide to Galápagos fish species. He said officials tolerate it because “trying to control fishermen has backfired,” provoking riots and hostage standoffs.
After the pandemic and the fall of the Mexican drug lord El Chapo, cocaine producers across South America have looked for new routes. Now cocaine trafficking is happening in the Galápagos: 225 tons of the drug were seized there in 2023.
Some tourists are wary of drug cartel violence. Last year, arrivals to the islands dropped a bit, to 279,277. (The country doubled the park entrance fee to $200, which likely also deterred some budget travelers.) But the number of Airbnbs keeps growing, despite the dip in visitors.
Ms. Ayala now leads a group of Airbnb proprietors whose 175 members pay her $10 a month in the hopes that unifying will give them influence if and when the proposed hotel plan arrives.
It’s a fight “for the people,” she said. “Locals just want to work legally without destroying the environment. Either way, the number of tourists will increase with or without Airbnb. But Airbnb keeps the money with Galapagueños, without building new places.”
As it turns out, however, the biggest threat to the hotel owners’ business may be one that it shares with Airbnb owners and scientific researchers. In July, citing the need to trim spending and boost the national economy, Ecuador’s government dissolved its Ministry of Environment, rolling it into its Ministry of Energy and Mines. Experts say this is akin to declaring war on nature.
César Rodríguez-Garavito, a professor at the N.Y.U. School of Law who studies legal protections for Galápagos ecosystems, believes the government shake-up is sending the message that “minerals, fossil fuels, and resource extraction” are more valuable than tourism and conservation. Some of Ecuador’s most ecologically sensitive regions, like the Amazon, contain huge deposits of oil and gold.
He expects Galapagueños to keep bickering over Airbnbs, and officials to keep largely ignoring the issue.
“You can have perfect legislation on paper, but the government has sent a clear message of what they care about, and it’s not conservation,” he said. “That’s not good for Galápagos.”
Todd Heisler is a Times photographer based in New York. He has been a photojournalist for more than 25 years.
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