The Encina de San Roque (the Spanish Oak of San Roque)

This holm oak is on a map drawn in 1778. By then it had already come through the felling that stripped the region's woods to feed the eighteenth-century galleon shipyards. It stands on Monte de La Redonda beside the Ermita de San Roque, above Colindres, looking over what was once the Camino Real, the medieval salt route, and the 1778 map is a map of that road. Roughly 400 years old and sixteen metres tall, it is 3.70 metres round at chest height and 4.40 metres at the base, where the trunk meets the hill. The clean stem runs a little over three metres before the crown begins. Why it was spared when the shipyards were taking timber, nobody records. What is recorded is what the town does with it now. The hillside hosts a World Environment Day gathering, and every August a countryside festival fills the ground around the chapel. In 2023 it beat fifteen other candidates to become Spain's Tree of the Year, backed by the town's Green Corridor tree-planting project, and went on to place sixth in Europe with 10,174 votes. It is a short walk up from the San Roque neighbourhood. Holm oaks stay green all year, so any month will do.