Ron Howard’s film Eden is based on a real 1930s attempt by a handful of European eccentrics to build a utopian community on Floreana, a remote island in the Galápagos, which devolved into scandal, disappearances, and suspicious deaths. The story was first widely popularized in memoirs and later in the documentary The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, and the film dramatizes these same events with some compression and invention.time+3
In 1931 German doctor Friedrich Ritter and Dore Strauch left their spouses and conventional lives in Germany to live as philosophical vegetarians on Floreana, hoping to create a self-sufficient “new Eden.”theguardian+1
Their isolation ended when another German couple, Heinz and Margret Wittmer, arrived with a child seeking a healthier climate and a simpler, “Swiss Family Robinson”–style pioneer life, creating tensions over resources and ideology.biography+1
In 1932 an Austrian woman styling herself Baroness Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet appeared with two lovers and plans for a luxury hotel, proclaiming herself “Empress” or “Baroness of Floreana.”time+2
Her theatrical behavior, open sexual triangle, and grandiose development schemes infuriated the more ascetic settlers and turned the tiny colony into a nest of jealousies, feuds, and power struggles.theguardian+1
In 1934 the Baroness and one of her lovers suddenly vanished; the Wittmers claimed she had sailed off to Tahiti on a passing yacht, but no vessel was ever identified and contemporaries suspected murder.kinofilmcollection+1
Not long after, Ritter died from apparent food poisoning amid reports of bitter conflict with Strauch, and another of the Baroness’s lovers later died while trying to leave the islands, cementing the episode’s reputation as an unsolved true-crime saga.biography+1
Eden keeps the basic constellation of figures—a philosopher-doctor, his ailing companion, the more conventional family, and the flamboyant “Baroness” with her lovers—and relocates them into a tense, thriller structure about competing visions of utopia.wikipedia+2
The film compresses timelines, heightens interpersonal conflict, and leans into mystery and violence, but its core scenario and many headline events (the utopian experiment, the hotel scheme, the disappearances) are drawn directly from the Floreana case.wikipedia+2
Primary accounts include memoirs by Dore Strauch and Margret Wittmer, which offer clashing interpretations of what happened on Floreana.theguardian+1
The documentary The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden assembles archival film shot on the island and interviews with descendants, and is the most detailed modern treatment of the episode that Eden adapts.kinofilmcollection