Skip to content 
With the opening of the new museum in Galapagos, many tourists visiting the islands miss the opportunity to learn more about the 8,000-year history of this stunning nation. Most visitors to Ecuador have yet to learn about the country’s human past. There are instances when individuals are unaware that the Galapagos Islands are populated and a part of Ecuador. This is the reason behind the opening of the Augmented Reality Museum of Pre-Columbian Art (Museo de Arte Precolombino de Realidad Aumentada, or MABRAE), the first museum of its sort in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.
The museum, which debuted in December 2016 and is housed in Puerto Ayora, the island nation’s capital, features 55 artifacts from archaeology that interact with augmented reality technology to improve the visiting experience.
Discover Galapagos
While the history of Ecuador’s people is fascinating, the Galapagos Islands’ unique flora and fauna are the main draw for tourists. Experiencing MAPRAE inside the breathtaking natural setting of Santa Cruz Island puts everything into perspective. Since the archipelago was founded, the natural evolution of the islands has been closely linked to the history of humans residing there.
By realizing our natural needs and origins as humans, we may better appreciate our place on the islands. Everything that has an impact on them also affects us. Thus, visiting this new museum in Galapagos may present an anthropological idea of how one cannot exist without the other, even if your goal for visiting the Galapagos Islands is purely natural. The visitor will observe the archeological figures and understand nature’s apparent impact on our ancestors’ daily lives and mentalities.
How It Operates The New Museum in Galapagos?
To use the augmented reality function once inside the new museum in Galapagos, visitors must download an app made in Ecuador and designed especially for it. A visitor can instantly receive all of the historical background, cultural details, and three-dimensional photographs on their smartphone or tablet by simply pointing it at one of the fifty-five objects.
What Makes This Galapagos Museum Worth Visiting?
This is not only an interactive opportunity for locals to learn and understand their own anthropological background but for visitors that due to limited-time in Ecuador, do not have the opportunity to stop in Quito or Guayaquil and visit some of their biggest and most renown anthropological museums.
Local museums in the Galapagos Islands, such as the Centro de Interpretación on San Cristobal Island, provide visitors with a glimpse into the history of the human race in the archipelago. Still, they do not delve into the anthropological and cultural foundations of the continent. For the vast number of foreign visitors that visit the islands each year to enjoy it, the MAPRAE aims to introduce continental Ecuadorian history into the isolation of the Galapagos Islands.
Santiago Osso, the creator of this brand-new museum in Galapagos, is drafting the patent for his innovative augmented reality museum application. However, Osso is confident that the novel approach to the history museum will benefit the Galapagos Islands’ tourism industry.
