The Redwood of the Fonte de Santa Teresa

Bucaco's other redwood stop stands on a slope above what locals reckon the best spring water in the whole forest, the Fonte de Santa Teresa, named for the sixteenth century Carmelite reformer Teresa of Avila. The register measured it in 2016 at 5.58 metres round and 45 metres tall, about 150 years old at the time, which puts it in the ground within a few decades of the forest's other sequoias, planted when the fashion for collecting the world's conifers was at its height. The fountain it grows beside is one stop on the Trilho da Agua, a walking trail built around Bucaco's historic water sources, Fonte Fria and Fonte do Carregal among them, that the forest describes as contemplative rather than athletic. A redwood needing fog and damp air to thrive has, by accident or design, ended up on the one trail in the forest built around water. Coast redwoods drink through their needles as much as their roots, drawing a real share of their water straight from the sea mist Bucaco's hillside catches off the Atlantic, which is the reason this species does as well here as it does anywhere outside its native California fog belt. This one has had a century and a half to put that trick to use.