The Redwood of the Porta das Lapas

Bucaco's second redwood stands 70 metres from the Porta das Lapas, the forest's western gate, on the path down to the Lago Grande where the walled forest's own cork oak already grows. At 45 metres tall it matches the height of the sequoia by the Fonte de Santa Teresa on the other side of the forest, with a slightly narrower trunk, 5.04 metres round against 5.58. This is not the pair of redwoods the forest's own biologist asked to have removed from this site in 2026, the two that used to stand by the ruined Ermida de Santo Elias: those are genuinely unreachable, off any path the forest maintains, and came down the same day the biologist wrote in. This one stands on a path visitors already walk to reach the Lago Grande, 450 metres off Bucaco's main published route but on mapped ground the whole way. Sequoia sempervirens needs fog to thrive outside its native California coast, and Bucaco's Atlantic hillside supplies enough of it that this one has grown as tall in Portugal as many of its relatives do at home, part of a collection of the world's conifers that nineteenth century plant hunters spent decades assembling behind this forest wall.