Birding in Spain: a Barcelona birdwatching tour and maybe much more!

Barcelona birdwatching tour

Are you a birder thinking of birding in Spain while visiting Barcelona? You might have considered organizing a Barcelona birdwatching tour, so you can go birdwatching around Barcelona for a day or two.

And then your desire for birdwatching might have taken you further. You will have surely heard about birding the steppes of Spain, and then could be tempted to add the steppes and plains of Lleida, Huesca or Zaragoza to your personalized birdwatching tour.

Birdwatching tours to Barcelona and the Ebro Valley plains and steppes

And then if the birdwatching tour has taken you to the steppes it would be a shame to miss out birdwatching in the Pyrenees, wouldn’t it? After all, the Pyrenees are not far from the steppes and offer some great birdwatching opportunities. So now on your birdwatching tour of Catalonia and northeast Spain you could include one of the beautiful national parks of the Pyrenees – Aigüestortes National Park in Catalonia, or Ordesa National Park in Aragón. These birding sites are ideal places for enjoying the most spectacular mountain scenery, but many there are many other places for birdwatching where you can bird for special alpine and forest birds.

Birdwatching tours to Barcelona and the Pyrenees

OK. So now we have a birdwatching tour starting in Barcelona and visiting the steppes and the Pyrenees. And what about birdwatching in the Ebro Delta? No birdwatching tour in this part of Spain would be complete without birding in the Ebro Delta for a surprising array of wetland birds.

Birdwatching tours to Barcelona and the Ebro Delta

This sounds like a brilliant birdwatching tour, but there are some problems. Firstly, what would be the ideal route for such a tour? What particular itineraries should be planned into this birdwatching tour to encounter the greatest variety of birds, and to guarantee some of the rarer or more localized birds? Well, that’s where we at Birding In Spain can help. 

Birdwatching tours to Barcelona with Birding in Spain

Secondly, how are we going to allocate ourselves enough time to do this birdwatching tour enough justice? Ah – now that’s something you have to work out for yourself.

Birding Mallorca a real treat

Birding Mallorca

Thanks to Geoff and June for their appreciative comments of the Birding In Spain itineraries for birding on Mallorca, as well as the useful update about access to the Salines de Salobrar in the south of the island.

Birding on Mallorca

First a sincere thank you for the information on your web site. We’ve just had a short birding trip to Majorca (Mallorca) and your information and itineraries were perfect.

Now some updated information. The salt company at the Salines de Salobrar have put up no access signs. There is also a locked gate on the path your itinerary tells visitors to use. By the gate there is a new information board about the birds, which we found strange. We then met another couple of birders who told us the company now want you to go to the salt plant and pay €10 to enter the site and walk around to see the birds. I have to admit we hoped across a bank and stayed at the edge of area to see what was there.

Finally, we spent quite a while looking for Thekla larks without any luck. On our last morning we took a walk from our rural hotel in Moscari to get a photo of the hotel across the fields and there, no more than 200m from the hotel, we saw a pair feeding.

We found Majorca a great place to bird watch at this time of the year.

Again thanks for your website.

Purple Gallinule, Porphyrio porphyrio. Also known as Purple Swamphen.

Elsewhere on Mallorca you can find Purple Gallinules 

Geoff & June Seabrook