Galapagos Islands culture

By Samuel Feinstein
University of Miami, Music Engineering

SANTA CRUZ, Galapagos Islands, Ecuador – The peppy sounds of folkloric trumpets and drums and saxophones blared from the sidewalk café on Darwin Avenue, the main street of the town of Puerto Ayora. Young men and women in billowing blouses and dresses, woven hats and colorful scarves, twirled past couples at little, hard-wood dinner tables. An outline of a frigate bird angled across the skirt of one of the dancers.

The dancers were all members of the Centro de Danza Galapagos, a cultural center started four years ago on Santa Cruz, the most populous island in the Galapagos. Viviana Varela, a classically trained ballet dancer, who grew up on the mainland of Ecuador, which governs the islands, is the founder and director of the center.

She noticed years ago that people who immigrated to the dry, hard volcanic islands from mainland Ecuador brought the culture and tradition of their regions with them, but that after nearly 200 years no distinctive Galapagos arts tradition had emerged. She, herself, had moved to the islands with her husband, Fausto Pita, a taxi driver, from Quito, the capital of Ecuador, more than 20 years ago. It was cold and rainy in Quito and her husband had heard that there was good money in shuttling tourists around the islands.

In the Galapagos, Varela found herself. She didn’t need any woolen clothes and she began to work to foster a Galapagos culture. She opened a cultural center on San Cristobal. And that went well.

But four years ago she and her husband divorced. She moved to Santa Cruz to take a job in an elementary school, Escuela San Francisco, teaching dance and other subjects and she started the Centro de Danza Galapagos. She had 14 students in her first dance group in Santa Cruz. Now she has 70 students. The youngest is three years old, the eldest, 40.

“We are creating a mix of all the different cultures, ” Varela said, and stirring in “influences from the islands themselves.”

Like Varelas’s dance, the music in the Galapagos has been evolving from a blend of sounds from elsewhere. Jonathan Zielke is a guitar teacher at Escuela San Francisco, a few blocks from Darwin Avenue in the main town. He grew up in Germany and trained at the John Lennon School of Music in Berlin. On Santa Cruz, he says, he hears the mystical sounds of the Andes melding with the soft, sometimes driving beat of Brazilian samba, and the laid-back rhythms of Jamaican reggae. He hears Latin reggaeton, American pop and global rock.

“You can hear alternative rock on the same stage as bolero, salsa and samba, complimenting and influencing each-other, ” Zielke said. Galapagos musicians, Zielke said, play guitar, ukulele, violin, flute, trumpet, bongo and conga drums, and the charango, a small guitar-like instrument from the Andes.