The Til of the Lago Grande

Til is a laurel that should not be growing on mainland Europe at all. Ocotea foetens belongs to the laurisilva, the fog forest that survives today only on Madeira, the Canary Islands and a handful of Atlantic islands, relict woodland that once covered much of the Mediterranean before the ice ages pushed it into a few sheltered pockets. Bucaco's specimen, 38 metres tall with a 3 metre trunk, stands by the Lago Grande, a few steps from the forest's own cork oak. Nobody has recorded its age. What the register does establish is size alone, and 38 metres is tall even by the standards of a forest built to grow things bigger than they grow at home: Bucaco's redwoods and blue gums are imports pushed to unusual heights by fog off the Atlantic, and here is a genuine laurisilva relict doing the same trick from the opposite direction, a species surviving on the mainland only because this one hillside happens to recreate the conditions its island cousins depend on. No second source has been found for this specific tree, so it ships flagged, on the forest's own 2016 measurement alone.