One day in May of 2026, Peter Clist’s doorbell rang at his home in Petersfield, England. A man Clist had never met handed him a piece of mail and said, “I’ve got a postcard for you.”
Clist only got the man’s first name (Hugh) before he left. The postcard was from the Galapagos Islands, and the writing on it was in Spanish. Though the card bore his address, it didn’t appear to be addressed to him. It appeared to be intended for “Sheila in Mr. Clists’s PM class.”
However, Clist, who teaches morning and afternoon Spanish classes, doesn’t have a student named Sheila in his afternoon class. The mystery of the sender, deliverer, and intended recipient was posted in the local newspaper. Within a week, it was mostly solved. The sender was Sheila, a former student of Clist’s. She had sent it to her former class while visiting the Galapagos.
But who was Hugh, the man who brought the postcard to Clist’s door?
The Galapagos Islands’ 233-year-old makeshift postal service
For over 200 years, there have been countless mystery “Hughs” delivering postcards from the Galapagos Islands by hand. The Galapagos has no post office and no postal service. Instead, it has an old wooden barrel on the island of Floreana. Travelers leave mail in the barrel in the hopes someone will eventually take it where it’s supposed to go.
No stamps. No postal workers. Definitely no expected time frame. Other tourists simply look through the mail to see if any it is addressed to places near where they live or will be traveling. Then they take it home with them for hand delivery.
That wooden barrel sits on Floreana Island at a spot known as “Post Office Bay,” which looks like this:
The historic tradition of the Galapagos Islands’ makeshift mail service
The barrel currently used is not the original, as ocean elements would have rendered it useless long ago. But the concept of how the “post office” works remains essentially unchanged since whaling ships frequented the islands in the 18th century.
Sailors who came through Floreana would leave mail in the barrel to be picked up by other seamen. Anyone who stopped there would sift through the pile to see if any were addressed to a stop on their upcoming itinerary. Rather than an official postal service, the system relied on ordinary people transporting messages wherever they were supposed to go.
It’s the same today. Visitors to the island look through the mail in the barrel to see if any is addressed to where they’re going. And it’s quite inspiring to see the lengths some people have gone to to hand-deliver a postcard from a remote island thousands of miles away.
Some travelers have dedicated years to distributing mail from the Galapagos
Some globetrotters have taken the Galapagos mail distribution system to heart and made it part of their travels around the world.
One man was touched by the idea of Post Office Bay during a trip to the Galapagos in 2023. He returned the following year, picked up 55 letters and postcards from a wide geographic area, determined to make sure they reached their intended recipients. And he did it in as pure a way as he could.
“I avoided using social media to get in touch with people, going purely by address,” he wrote in The Guardian. “If they weren’t there, I’d ask around locally, then use social media, doing my best to hand-deliver the letter. Sometimes, friends who had joined me for part of the trip could help translate, but I had to rely on Google Translate a lot. Usually, people were initially confused, but that would turn to complete joy as they read their letter.”
Sometimes postcard delivery leads to beautiful personal connections
A woman who loved to travel with her husband did something similar in 2011. The couple scooped up 22 postcards from the barrel to deliver around the world. She shared the story of a particularly sweet encounter they had a few years later on the BBC:
“Halfway through our stack of postcards, we found ourselves in Iceland. We had just revealed the missive when tears started forming in our new friend’s eyes. My husband and I shared an uneasy glance, as we weren’t sure what her next reaction would be. Her tears quickly turned to stifled laughter. Half sobbing, half smiling, she explained that she had written the postcard to herself and our lack of comprehension of the Icelandic language resulted in us missing a key element scribbled on the top right-hand side of the postcard: that it should be left in the barrel until she could return to get it.
However, she then told us that her life had drastically changed from when she was there last, and the delivery of her postcard could not have come at a better time, since it was unlikely that she’d ever return to the Galapagos. Her self-written postcard reminded her of how far she’d come since her visit four years prior, and of all of the positive changes that had occurred. We spent more than an hour in the tiny cafe, lingering over our lukewarm lattes as we bonded over our shared love of adventure, the story of the post barrel and the future.“
How lovely to know this fun tradition is still connecting people around the world after 233 years. Here’s to the Hughs of the world who go out of their way to keep it going.
