Back in late May, we took a trip down the road to El Parque Natural del Delta de L’Ebre in Tarragona to see the flamingos!
The Delta L’Ebre is also the Spain’s major rice producer making the whole area a heaven for wetland birds. The salt marshes are the perfect location for Catalunya’s Flamingos. Introduced to the park in 1992, most of the them hang out around La Tancada and Trinitat and can be seen all year round.
Along the main road to the Barra del Trabucador that runs alongside La Tancada you can see a few. The main flock back in May were the other side which required going inland, trusting the GPS down narrow roads flanked by rice fields in the middle of nowhere. Thankfully while minimal sign posted after parking in an abandoned building’s ‘garden’ a 5 minute walk we were at the hide. In fact you can walk and cycle to the hide, but we didn’t know this and it was getting late. Sunset was I think 40 minutes away. If looking on the map the whole delta doesn’t look that big, but it is! We stayed just outside the delta (just I thought it was in the delta) and to get to the main spots took at least 25 minutes driving.
View from the hide looking towards the mountains. Some farmers use black plastic flags to scare away birds from the rice, others use timed sound guns which echo across the whole delta.
The delta is the 2nd largest wetlands in the Mediterranean and home to about 3000 species of birds either migrating through or present all year round. You never know what you’re going to see from glossy ibises working the rice fields to ducks, herons, egrets, songbirds and of course the flamingos! I feel so lucky to have seen one in flight looking like a magical flying carpet. A flock of them flying would have been the bomb, but I’ll settle for the lone flamingo!
Some of the other delta residents.
Thank you for stopping by!
