Ruta del flamenco

We had a great time on the Flamingo route, the guide was informative and knew exactly where to find the flamingoes!

Pleasant mutito tour by Ria. The flamingos are the excuse for the tour, but it may not be possible to see them very well. But the trip is pleasant and the captain/guide, Antonio, is very friendly.

We paid 60 euro (CASH! an important factor to remember here) to take a boat through the Ria Formosa natural park to see the flamingoes along with 2 other families, one German with a young son and the other a French family, who had 2 very young children and another single woman traveller. The tour started at 3.00pm (an hour earlier than usual our skipper (later) told us, so that the company could fit in another booking) and initially the skipper was very unhappy about having to go out again. After a 20 minute wait to board the boat, without so much as a hello and welcome, whilst he clearly got over his hump, we were off! He was very informative but after we pulled up alongside the area where the flamingoes were, it became apparent that unless we could extremely long legs and were fortunate to benefit from a very high tide, that there was no way we could ever hope to see inside the flamingo area. We ended up going to Tavira for half an hour to wait for the 'tide to change' and then heading back out again. The skipper pulled the boat up on the wrong side of the channel, driving the boat up onto the rocks and in the end asking each of us to step up on the front section of the boat, with a pair of binoculars to strain to see the birds in the distance... we would have been better off watching flamingoes on a TV! It was dangerous, the boats passing were clearly unhappy with what we were doing and when we returned to shore, we were told we were not getting our money back. We had seen the flamingoes! Conveniently, we all paid CASH, were given no receipt, and the poor girl in the booth by the shore had to take our group's complaints whilst NO-ONE FROM THE 'OFFICE' OR CUSTOMER SERVICE would speak us. A right roy rip-off!! Give this a wide berth!