The whole plan today was to go to 📍Loro Parque (Spanish for “Parrot Park”). What started as a paradise for parrots evolved into a 135,000 m² zoo that hosts around 4000 individual parrots representing about 350 species and sub-species, as well as many other animals including, but not limited to, black swans, golden pheasants, great curassows, laughing kookaburra, penguins, puffins, flamingo, chimpanzees, western lowland gorillas, emperor tamarins, California sea lions, Asian small-clawed otters, meerkats, red pandas, jaguars, white tigers, lions, pygmy hippos, capybaras, giant anteaters, American alligators, Galápagos tortoises, African spurred tortoises, a large bunch off exotic fish, seahorses, various sharks and a number of other animals we likely didn’t see. There’s a lot and, as we would learn through our day, all of it is a freaking pain in the ass to photograph! We probably have taken more blurry pictures of animals than anything but we were nowhere close to getting it all.
4000 parrots is a lot of parrots! Think about it, if we took 30 seconds to meet each one of them individually we would need 33 hours to meet them all. That’s assuming the park doesn’t close (which it does, at 17:30) and they all nicely lined up next to one another. It’s an admirable goal to want to meet them all and, while we did find parrot habitations everywhere we went; it’s still a large park. Also, in the aviaries, if they aren’t eating they are zipping around making the meet and greet a lot harder.
In total we spent about 3 hours in the park moving from one section to the next and meeting a lot of different species for the first time in 3D. After that we were spent and ready to head out of the park and start our walk back to the apartment. While there is a free “train” between the city center and the park, it’s a larger version of the kids trains you can see in malls and inside park attractions. We aren’t the most prideful of people we still wouldn’t be caught dead in one of them. They are too associated with entitled tourist with no manners in our minds to even go close to them in fear of being labeled one. It did help that most of the walk between the city and the park can be done along the beach.
To end it all, and to keep up with the theme of a lot of everything, at dinner we were served a literal school of, admittedly grilled, fishes. What was described in the menu as “the grilled fish for two” turned put to be a good kilo of fish. We should have clued in on that possibility when we decided to have diner at La CofradĂa de Pescadores (the brotherhood of fishermen or the guild of fishermen). If they can’t serve you the huge one that got away, they’ll serve you many (or most) of the ones they caught.