Accompanied by my friend and fellow photographer Garth Peacock, we embarked on a 16 day tour of 2 sites in Spain in May 2026. Aveshides a company that specialises in wildlife photography in Spain were our guides for the trip.
Following a flight from Heathrow and a 5 hour drive from Madrid Airport we arrived at the lovely village of Cremenes and our accommodation, the Hotel Huelde, our base for the next 8 nights. The area was beautiful with the majestic Picos mountain range close by.
After meeting our guide Bernardo, our 1st morning was spent at a local hide where we hoped to photograph one of the main target species of our trip – Golden Eagle. We were soon rewarded with visits and lovely views of Black Kites, Ravens, Buzzard, Carrion Crows and eventually Griffon Vultures. The Eagle finally put in an appearance and came down just as we were beginning to give up hope but frustratingly managed to always be in long grass just over the brow of a hill, resulting in just head shots. It stayed for only a short while, but looking at the itinerary we thought there would be several more opportunities over the coming days for better images – Little did we know!!! We never saw one close by again.
It is fair to say that following that promising start, the rest of the trip was a mixture of success, bad luck & failure, with the weather having a significant impact on our visit. It was so ridiculously hot that many birds that we had hoped to see simply did not appear. Needless to say that by the end of this leg of the trip we were almost at the point of ignoring Black Kites and Griffon Vultures as they were literally everywhere.
The highlights for me was the trip to Picos de Europa, part of the magnificent mountain range and reached by the Fuenta de cable car, the views were simply breathtaking and once at the top we enjoyed lovely images of Alpine Choughs, Alpine Accentors, Wheatears and in my case and much to Garth’s’ annoyance a lovely Snow-finch. The other highlight was a wonderful but hair-raising car ride up a a very bumpy track on a mountain side above the snow line to photograph Bluethroat, Wheatear, Rock Thrush and Water Pipit, we also had distant glimpses of Chamois but alas to far away to photograph.
So then it was another long drive on to EL Taray a private estate about 8 kms from the town of Villacanas, our base for the next 7 nights. The weather continued to have an impact but less so than up north. Villacanas is a typical Spanish town but with a lovely square just outside our hotel were we ate each night – terrific. The highlight of this part of the trip for me was the boat trip to a lovely floating hide in reed beds with Bearded Tits, Great and Common Reed Warblers and also the same day – European Rollers, and Hoopoes 2 of my favourite birds. As with Cremenes the ubiquitous species here were Marsh Harriers.
The big disappointment however was the Spanish Imperial Eagle which appeared so early in the morning it rendered good photography almost impossible due to the very low light levels. I have to say that I believe we could have visited this hide later with better results but the guides insisted we needed to be there at first light.
All in all, I think the trip was about 4 days too long, there was lot of visiting hides for the 2nd time to try to get better results and in most case just repeating the first visit.
