The Galapagos Marine Reserve: the 2026 visit rules and what divers face.

Who manages the reserve

The Galapagos National Park Directorate (Direccion del Parque Nacional Galapagos, DPNG) manages both the Galapagos National Park and the Galapagos Marine Reserve. Its 2026 visit rules apply to everyone in both areas: visitors, residents, tour operators, guides and researchers.

Academic and conservation sources, which we saw only in search summaries and could not check against the law itself, say the marine reserve was created by Ecuador's Galapagos Special Law of 1998, published as Law No. 278 on 18 March 1998, with a management plan in 1999. They give its area as about 138,000 square kilometres and say it joined the UNESCO World Heritage listing in 2001.

The Hermandad Marine Reserve (2022)

On 14 January 2022, President Guillermo Lasso signed a decree creating the Hermandad Marine Reserve, according to Pew. Pew describes it as about 60,000 square kilometres between the Galapagos Marine Reserve and Costa Rica's maritime border, half of it fully protected along a migratory corridor and half closed to longline fishing.

The sources give different sizes for the expansion. Pew and others give the 60,000 square kilometres of new area. A page on galapagos.org describes the expansion as bringing the total protected area to about 198,000 square kilometres, which counts the original reserve as well.

The 2026 visit rules

The DPNG's Resolution MAE-PNG/DIR-2026-0044-RM was signed on 12 August 2026 and published in Ecuador's official gazette, the Registro Oficial (Third Supplement No. 368), on 14 September 2026. It repeals an earlier resolution of 12 May 2026. We read summaries of the resolution by the legal publisher LEXIS and the magazine Vistazo, not the full text, so the points below come from those summaries.

Guides

According to LEXIS, an accredited naturalist guide is required to enter the protected areas, except at sites the authority expressly exempts.

Distances from wildlife

Sunscreen, photography and vessels

• Sunscreens containing oxybenzone or octinoxate are restricted during water activities in the marine protected areas (LEXIS).
• Flash photography is prohibited, and flying drones or filming with professional equipment needs the DPNG's prior authorisation (Vistazo).
• Motorised personal water vehicles, tourist submarines and air tourism are prohibited in the protected zones, and vessels approaching must slow to no more than 4 knots (LEXIS).

Sanctions

Vistazo reports that breaches go through administrative sanctioning procedures under the LOREG, the law for the Galapagos special regime, and the COA, Ecuador's Organic Environmental Code. Social-media posts can be used as evidence, operators and guides can lose their licences, and harm to wildlife is referred to the public prosecutor.

Night diving: not settled

The sources disagree on night diving, and we could not settle it from the resolution text:

• Vistazo (21 September 2026) reports that the 2026 rules allow night diving between 18:00 and 22:00, with a general visiting window at authorised sites of 06:00 to 18:00. This is a single press report; the LEXIS summary does not mention diving hours.
• An undated dive travel company's guide states that night dives are forbidden in the Galapagos National Park. Because it is undated, it may describe the rules before 2026.

Until the DPNG's own text can be checked, the night-diving position is unconfirmed.

Certification and diving limits

We did not find any DPNG text setting dive-specific rules such as a minimum certification, solo diving or technical diving. Claims on those points come from tour operators and vary between them. The one point on which their statements openly conflict is shown here, labelled as operator statements:

• Operators state that local regulations do not allow decompression or technical dives, and one says rebreather diving counts as technical and is not allowed. Other trips, however, advertise closed-circuit rebreather diving in the Galapagos. The sources disagree, and we found no authority text that resolves it.

What the certification levels mean, as the agencies publish them, is on certification levels. For what agencies say about staying within training, see diving within your training.

What we could not confirm

We could not read the full text of Resolution MAE-PNG/DIR-2026-0044-RM, so its diving hours and any dive-specific conduct rules are not confirmed. A 2024 DPNG visit-rules document could not be read because its text was image-based. Earlier ministerial agreements on diving tourism and the training of diving guides appear in legal databases, but their current status could not be confirmed and they are not described here.