Hot Air Balloon Rides in Salamanca
Sunrise rides starting at Viveros Florjusa, over the sandstone old town, the two cathedrals and the River Tormes. Around 215 EUR per person.
Salamanca is built out of one quarry. The sandstone comes from Villamayor, a few kilometres north, and it darkens to honey as it weathers, which means the entire old town changes colour together when the sun comes up. That is the argument for being in the air here rather than sitting in the Plaza Mayor with a coffee. Flights start at Viveros Florjusa, the plant nursery on the edge of the city where you meet the crew before driving on to the launch field, and cost around 215 EUR per person.
The city from above
From a few hundred metres the old town reads as a dense gold block with three things pushing out of it. The two cathedrals make one silhouette, the Romanesque old one pressed against the flank of the late Gothic new one, and the scaled dome of the Torre del Gallo gives the join away. The twin towers of La Clerecia stand a short way west. The Plaza Mayor is a hole in the roofscape, a clean rectangle of shadow until the sun clears the arcades. South of all that the Tormes runs wide and shallow under the Roman bridge, whose inner arches are first-century work and whose outer half was rebuilt after a seventeenth-century flood. Past the last roundabouts the province takes over: dehesa, the thinned holm oak pasture where Iberian pigs and fighting bulls are raised, running flat to the horizon. You stand for the whole flight and the basket wall reaches roughly chest height, which is worth knowing if you are flying with children or with anyone unsteady on their feet; see who can fly for the usual limits.
Season, and what a Spanish flight includes
The season runs from spring into late autumn, and May, June, September and early October give the most reliable dawns. Winter mornings on the Castilian plain often sit under fog, which grounds a balloon as effectively as wind does; the seasonal guide goes into what that means for booking. Time in the air is 60 to 90 minutes. The flight ends with a cava toast and a certificate carrying your name, which Spanish crews treat as part of the flight rather than a souvenir. Confirmation usually arrives a day or two ahead and a scrubbed morning normally means a new date rather than money back, so leave room in the itinerary and check the cancellation terms before you pay, as our notes on choosing an operator set out.
