ABSTRACT
Managing the resource National park designation In Europe and North America conservationists and even representatives of the travel industry are seriously considering the introduction of ‘no-go areas’ for tourists as a solution to the damage caused by tourism to fragile physical and cultural resources. In the Galapagos this has been the policy for many years. As early as 1959, when the number of visitors was less than 1000 a year, the Ecuadorian government designated 97 per cent of the archipelago, excluding only those areas already settled, as a National Park. In 1968 the Charles Darwin Foundation, an international non-profit organization, was established to protect the islands’ ecosystems in cooperation with the Galapagos National Park Service (GNPS), a government agency. Organized tourism began at about this time and in 1974 a master plan for the National Park set a limit of 12 000 visitors a year, later expanded to 40 000 for economic reasons, with a maximum visitor stay of six days.
