Hot-air balloon ride
One of the 13 activities you could get with Go Red, from €75 per person. Like all of them, you do not find out this is the one until between 48 and 24 hours beforehand.
About hot-air ballooning
What is a balloon flight like?
Not many people think of this when they think of a day out. The ones who do it, though, tend not to forget it.
What you get is the freedom, the silence and the calm of a balloon flight, broken only when the burners go on.
Anyone who has done it will tell you it feels like a privilege: you see everything below you the way a bird does.
Watching the sun come up while you float is priceless — well, it has a price, but it is worth every bit of it.
Activity at a glance
Balloon flights
Here is how the day works.
Flights are almost always at first light, which means an early start, at a time that shifts with the season. The reason is that as the day warms up it produces thermals, and thermals are no friend of a balloon.
How much a balloon flight costs
Write to us for the price per person.
How long a balloon flight lasts
A flight usually lasts about an hour, which is more than enough to take in everything below you.
Counting the rigging, the inflation, the preparation and packing the envelope away afterwards, the whole thing runs to about 3 hours.
Where to fly a balloon in Spain
With GoRandom you can fly in several places:
- Balloon flights in Bizkaia
- Hot-air balloons in Álava
- You can also fly in Gipuzkoa
When to fly a balloon
You can only fly on clear days — both for a calm flight and for the view to be worth having.
So the forecast matters. Rain, fog or unfavourable wind and the flight does not go ahead.
Hot-air balloon ride
The obvious question is how high you go. Usually between 300 and 500 metres, depending on where you fly. And no, it is not colder up there: the temperature is much the same as on the ground.
So dress for the temperature at the time of the flight, and wear comfortable shoes.
The other worry people have is vertigo once they are up.
First, as we said, flights are calm. With some wind it can be livelier, but as a rule they are about as relaxed as it gets: the sensation is of floating, with nothing sudden about it.
And because the balloon moves with the air and there is no reference for how high you are, people rarely feel vertigo on board.
If you are bringing children, what matters is not so much their age as their height.
You fly in a basket, and you need to be tall enough to see over the edge of it. Otherwise the view is wasted.
It is worth doing at least once. It opens your eyes, and it shows you the scale of the landscape from somewhere very few people get to stand.
On the website of the Royal Spanish Aeronautical Federation (RFAE) you will find everything to do with ballooning: the regulations, the competition calendar and so on.