To which South American country do the Galápagos Islands belong?

The Galápagos Islands are part of the Republic of Ecuador and an archipelago of volcanic islands distributed on either side of the Equator in the Pacific Ocean  906 km (563 mi) west of continental Ecuador. The islands are known for their vast number of endemic species and were studied by Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle, as his observations and collections contributed to the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

The first crude map of the islands was made in 1684 by Ambrose Cowley, who named the individual islands after some of his fellow pirates or after British royalty and noblemen. These names were used in the authoritative navigation charts of the islands prepared during the Beagle survey under captain Robert Fitzroy, and in Darwin's popular book "The Voyage of the Beagle". The new Republic of Ecuador took the islands from Spanish ownership in 1832, and gave them official Spanish names.

The group consists of 18 main islands, 3 smaller islands, and 107 rocks and islets. The archipelago is located on the Nazca Plate (a tectonic plate), which is moving east/southeast, diving under the South American Plate at a rate of about 2.5 inches (6.4 cm) per year. It is also atop the Galápagos hotspot, a place where the Earth's crust is being melted from below by a mantle plume, creating volcanoes. The first islands formed here at least 8 million and possibly up to 90 million years ago.