Long before Pizarro, Gorgona was inhabited. Archaeological remains dating to about 1300 AD mark it as a seat of the Guna people - expert sailors and goldsmiths whose descendants still live in Panama's Guna Yala region and parts of coastal Colombia. They fished, farmed, and worked stone and gold. Other settlements came and went. Diego de Almagro was the first European ashore in 1524 and named the island San Felipe, a name that did not stick. Pizarro's Gorgona did. After the Spanish conquest, an indigenous cacique named Yundigua lived on the island, probably a member of the Sindagua people who inhabited the coast between Narino and Cauca. The English pirate Bartholomew Sharp seized the island in 1679 after sacking Guayaquil and briefly renamed it Captain Sharp's Island. The privateers Woodes Rogers and William Dampier resupplied here in 1709. Ships moving between Panama and Peru used Gorgona's streams and timber for centuries.

In 1959 the Colombian government converted the island into a high-security prison. The reasoning was unimaginative: surrounded by shark-patrolled water, crawling with venomous snakes, Gorgona looked like a place from which escape was impossible. The prison was built, according to official Colombian descriptions, following the model of Nazi concentration camps. Inmates slept on bare frames - no mattresses, no pillows. The bathrooms were pit toilets with walls lowered so guards could watch prisoners at all times. Violence among prisoners was constant. Disease and snake bites killed many. The island held Colombia's most violent offenders, men convicted of murder and rape, and conditions were designed to be punitive rather than rehabilitative. The prisoners lived through this for twenty-five years.

One man escaped. Daniel Camargo Barbosa - a serial rapist and murderer serving a life sentence - had studied the Pacific currents from the beach for years. On September 24, 1984, during the feast of the Virgin of Mercy when the guards' routines shifted, he hid in the brush and built a small raft from logs tied with jungle vines. A day later, he reached the mainland. The authorities assumed he had drowned or been taken by sharks. The press reported he had been eaten. He was alive. From that September through February 1986, Camargo moved through Ecuador killing and raping girls - the confirmed count ranges from 72 to 180 victims. He was finally captured in Quito after murdering a nine-year-old. Sentenced to 16 years in an Ecuadorian prison, he was killed by a fellow inmate in November 1994. The penal colony on Gorgona closed on June 25, 1984 - three months before Camargo's escape, though some transfers were still in progress. The last prisoners were moved to mainland facilities that same year.

Gorgona is a geological oddity on a planetary scale. The island contains the youngest known komatiites on Earth - silica-poor lava flows that normally only occur in Archean rocks over 2.5 billion years old, when the planet's interior was much hotter. Gorgona's komatiites formed during the Cretaceous, about 90 million years ago. Geologists have spent decades arguing about how this was possible. On the southern tip of neighboring Gorgonilla, a thin layer of marine sediment marks the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary - the moment the Chicxulub asteroid struck the Yucatan and ended the dinosaurs. The layer contains glass spherules blasted from the impact site and flung across the Pacific, preserved in Gorgonilla's mudstone almost perfectly. Standing on that beach, you can put your hand on sediment that records the exact moment a rock from space killed most of the life on Earth.

Gorgona became a National Natural Park in 1984, and the jungle has largely reclaimed the prison buildings. Visitors need permission to come ashore. No more than 80 people can stay at a time. Camping is forbidden. Every visitor is assigned a guide - not for tourism, but because the snakes are still everywhere, and you are not allowed to walk off the beach without boots and supervision. The endemic blue anole, *Anolis gorgonae*, is unique in the world: the only all-blue anole species, a lizard whose entire body gleams the color of a Pacific twilight. It is endangered, struggling against habitat loss and the introduced western basilisk. Offshore, from August through October, humpback whales arrive to give birth. Hammerheads and whale sharks cruise the reefs. Brown boobies nest on the cliffs at *Sula leucogaster etesiaca* densities found nowhere else in the world. Gorgona's cloud, said to hang permanently over the summit, catches the afternoon rain and drops it back into the forest. The island is doing what islands do when left alone. It is being itself.