Hot Air Balloon Rides in Spain

Spain does not fly balloons everywhere. There is plenty of sky, but the flights people actually book cluster around a few historic towns on the meseta, one airfield in Catalonia and the middle of Ibiza. Part of that is airspace and part of it is wind. Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia are ringed by controlled airspace, so the balloons go up an hour inland, and the city named in the tour title is often the place you sleep rather than the place you fly over.

Read the meeting point before you read the price. It is the field that decides what your hour looks like, and in Spain the field is frequently an hour's drive from the name on the booking. A Segovia flight sold with a Madrid pickup and a Segovia flight sold in Segovia put you in the same basket over the same aqueduct; one of them just adds a coach in the dark at either end. Toledo is the one to pick if you only fly once, because the old town sits inside a loop of the Tagus and reads like a scale model from a few hundred metres up. Ibiza is the outlier: green interior, almond terraces, and no sign at all of the coast the island is known for.