Bird Watching Holidays in Portugal | Peaceful-Portugal.com

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Bird watching holidays, guided and non guided, half board, full board throughout southern Portugal

Bird Watching Holidays
Quinta do Barranco
10 En-suite Rooms
Lakeside Location

Location: Santa Clara a Velha
Odemira, Alentejo

We invite you to join us at Quinta do Barranco for guided and non-guided birdwatching holidays throughout southern Portugal with a centralised location in a sparsely populated region of unique beauty.

Quinta do Barranco da Estrada is a small family-run hotel in a stunning lakeside location.

The Quinta has an international reputation for good food, company and service, and its size, with a maximum of twenty guests, ensures that you feel welcome from the moment you arrive.

The Quinta is also ideally suited to those guests whose numbers include couples of whom only one is a dedicated birder, as there are plenty of facilities for a relaxing holiday away from all the hustle and bustle of a normal destination.

There is a wide variety of bird life in the Quinta´s vicinity, notably one of Europe´s most interesting ornithological enigmas, the Azure Winged Magpie (Cyanopica cyana).

This species only occurs in the southern Iberian Peninsula and South East Asia and nowhere in-between. It was commonly supposed that an early traveller had brought back a pair that had subsequently escaped, but in 1999 a skeleton was radio-carbon dated in Gibraltar at 44,000 years old, which switched the line of enquiry to climate change and recent DNA research has pointed towards the southern Iberian population being a different species.

Also present near the Quinta are a wide variety of Warblers, Stonechats, two species of Shrike, Bee-eaters, Kingfishers, three varieties of Woodpeckers and three of Eagles, (Short toed, Booted and Bonelli´s), as well as other raptors, notably Peregrine Falcons. The area also has one of the highest densities in Europe of Nightingales, and during the Spring one is rarely out of earshot of their beautiful song.

Our bird watching holidays are a non-intrusive, eco-friendly and informative format, and we are a member of the RSPB, (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) and SPEA (Sociedade Portuguesa para o Estudo das Aves).

The Quinta can be easily accessed by road. There are regular trains from Lisbon or Faro, both of which are serviced by scheduled or charter flights from most major airports.

Guests can arrange their own car hire or they can be collected from the airport (Faro is 1½ hours drive away, Lisbon about 2½). The Quinta is happy to arrange road transfers between the airport or the local railway station.

The Quinta is located in the Lower ´Baixo´ Alentejo. As the crow flies, it is about 40 km from the West or South coasts.

View the village Santa Clara a Velha on Google Maps (enter the text below in the search field)

Santa Clara a Velha, Odemira, Alentejo, Portugal

If you would like to make an enquiry about bird watching holidays please email us with your name, contact details, preferred dates and number of guests:

Advertise your holiday rental accommodation with peaceful-portugal