Santa Cruz is the island most visitors know best, and for good reason: it sits in the middle of the archipelago, it has the airport connection, the biggest town and the widest choice of day trips. Puerto Ayora runs along the shore of Academy Bay, a grid of restaurants, dive shops, agencies and small hotels that gets lively at dusk when the fish market opens and the pelicans and sea lions line up for scraps. Behind the town the land rises through cactus and scrub into a green, often misty highland of farms, lava tunnels and giant tortoises, and beyond it drops back to a wild north coast of beaches and mangroves. The island is the base for most of the boat days in the central archipelago: Bartolomé, North Seymour, Santa Fe, South Plaza and Pinzón all leave from here or from the Itabaca Channel in the north.
