Volunteer life at ARA - Animal Rescue Algarve, Portugal

Some impressions of my stay of roughly a month at Animal Rescue Algarve in southern Portugal. ARA is a dog shelter that takes care of over a 100 dogs (and a few cats) and finds them new families. The staff members are all very kind people and they care not only for the dogs but also for the volunteers who come to support them. If you are ever interested in going there, one possible way is to contact them via www.workaway.com like I did.

Accommodation for volunteers is free, in exchange for working two shifts a day. The first shift was always from 9am to roughly 11:30am and the second one from 3pm to 5pm (during the summer months the times slightly change). It should not really be called work, though, as it was always fun. You walk the dogs, play with them and sometimes help the workers with a few other tasks. The only part that wasn't that much fun was cleaning the kennels of the poo and pee, but that wasn't as bad as you might think either.

All my fellow volunteers were fun to hang out with and I really felt like living with really close friends there. All of us said this was a fantastic experience and that we would like to come again one day.

The shelter is located near Loulé in south Portugal, a 30 minute drive away from Faro which is where my plane landed.
Once a week you get a day off, so you have a chance to explore the surrounding areas. One destination that can be recommended is Lagos in the south west of the country. Even though it is a bit farther away from Loulé, it is possible to take a one hour train trip there, enjoy the beautiful city with the beaches and magnificent cliffs along the coastline and go back to the shelter in the evening. Or you can just travel around Portugal after your stay at ARA. (Once the Corona situation is a thing of the past, of course. I was forced to go back to my home country, but luckily just at the time I was about to return anyway)


*About the last scene of the video: ARA's big facility includes several parks of different sizes in which we often would put a group of dogs so that they could spend some time there together instead of being separated in their smaller kennels. At the end of our afternoon shifts we would bring them back into their kennels. The fastest way to do that was to just let all the dogs run out and have a few people make sure they run downstairs to the area (with fences around it) where the kennels are located. Then we could just put every dog into his or her kennel. Usually there would be one or two dogs in each kennel.