The Tralee Blog

After almost ten years of intensive planning the proposed ”Lee Valley Park“ between Tralee and Blennerville can finally take shape. Mary Hanafin, Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport, yesterday announced - somewhat unexpectedly by most in the current economic climate - that a quite generous grant of almost 3 million Euro has now been allocated to the project. I think this is great news for Tralee, especially because the park will be the only new tourism project of that scale in Ireland to go ahead this year. [»]

Today we spent the best part of the day watching a pod of ca. ten pilot whales in Sandy Bay near Castlegregory. While this may sound like a nice activity it has infact been a quite distressing experience, because this particular bay is at best five metres deep, and pilot whales are a deep water species. They can easily become completely disorientated in a shallow environment like that. Worse still, the same pod had already stranded once yesterday evening only a few hundred metres further up the bay, but the whales could be successfully refloated. [»]

While there are still more than 500 google-entries pointing potential visitors to “Fenit Seaworld”, that former attraction has infact closed a long time ago. Yesterday I spent some time in Fenit Harbour and took the opportunity to bring you a picture of the now disused building, because it will probably demolished very soon to make room for a new warehouse. If you wish to see a good display of native and tropical sealife in Kerry I would recommend to visit the Dingle Oceanworld Mara Beo instead.

People visiting The Square in the redeveloped town centre of Tralee have always been delighted with the great lighting installation, which (up to last week) consisted of blue airport-like “taxiway” lights embedded in the ground and standard street lights which were fixed to the walls of the adjacent buildings. While the former stays unchanged, the standard light bulbs for the street lighting had to go and where replaced with newly developed, low energy LED-lights.  [»]

Today I happened to visit Blennerville again, and right opposite the famous windmill there is now a newly erected bird viewing hide with great explanatory signs. Although situated right beside the well frequented N86 (the main Tralee - Dingle connection) there is a surprising variety of bird species on display, for the intertidal areas of the River Lee at the Tralee Bay Nature Reserve are known to be very important feeding grounds for many seasonal seabirds. [»]