The Bunya Knight

A few dozen metres from the tallest tree in Europe stands the tallest bunya pine in Portugal, on the same path in the same small forest. Araucaria bidwillii is a Queensland conifer with stiff, spined foliage and a trunk that goes up like a mast. This one carries 3.7 metres of girth under 54 metres of height, and the tree-measuring project that surveyed Vale de Canas rates it the biggest of its species in the country. Not everyone agrees on the number. A visitor writing in 2021 gave the height as 49 metres against the register's 54, which is the sort of gap that opens up when a crown has to be measured from the ground through other trees. The species carries more history than its Portuguese address suggests. That same 2021 account notes what the register does not, that Araucaria bidwillii is a sacred tree to Aboriginal peoples in its native southeast Queensland. Here it is one specimen among imported conifers and eucalypts. The register put both this tree and the karri beside it at 140 years when it measured them in 2015, which makes it somewhere around 145 to 155 now, and Portugal classified the pair together in August 2002. It is the quieter half of a two-tree walk that leaves your neck at an angle.