Welcome to the Altiplano website.

In case you haven’t come across us before, let us introduce ourselves and tell you a little about the type of tours we run.

Altiplano was originally conceived on a birdwatching trip in the Coto Doñana in May 2004, with the aim of providing professionally organised, good value birdwatching and wildlife tours.

But as well as placing a strong emphasis on good value we make no compromise on the birding as can be seen from our tour itineraries. We go to the top birding sites in the countries we visit and use the best local guides. However, we also appreciate that there is much more to birding than birds! So, our tours are run with an awareness of the wonders and beauty of the natural world as a whole and although the focus of the trips is often on birds, this does not mean that we ignore the rest of nature in a blind chase to tick off as many birds as possible. We take the attitude that nature and travel are to be savoured, so we take time... time to absorb the sights around us, time to look at the birds and animals in front of us, time to enjoy and understand our planet.

We run our trips in a relaxed friendly atmosphere, and specialise in tours with small group numbers, as this makes for better birding; typically, we have only 4-8 participants on any trip plus a local guide, and this is why so many people, having travelled with us once, come back and do it again!

A unique feature that we are introducing to all our tours is a sliding price scale, where the more people who book on a tour the less you pay. Over the next few months this will become a standard feature of every tour that we run - we shall pass the cost savings of larger groups on to you.

At Altiplano we pride ourselves on the quality of our tour leaders and guides and one of our fields of expertise is in tracking down the endemic and range-restricted species of the country we visit. Many of our tours are lead by expert local, bi-lingual guides who will meet you on arrival at your destination, but very often the tour will have a British leader who will accompany you throughout the journey. However, we are unique among tour operators in that our British leaders are not paid and this helps to keep down considerably the cost of our tours.

Those who travel with us range from complete beginners to lifelong birdwatchers and naturalists, but your level of experience is less important than your attitude – our guides will show the way to those of you new to birding or new to a country - but we do ask those who travel with us to bring along an interest in nature, a sense of humour and a pair of binoculars!