The Stone Pine of Santa Maria de Trassierra

Santa Maria de Trassierra is a village in the hills above Cordoba, and this stone pine is one of the specimens the city's own catalogue of singular trees reaches out beyond the city walls to include. Three metres twenty six round, twenty five metres tall, and estimated at about ninety years old, it is younger than most trees on this list but old enough, and large enough, to have earned its own entry in an official register that mostly protects far older specimens. Pinus pinea is the pine that shapes half of Mediterranean Spain's skyline, its flat, umbrella-shaped crown grown for shade and for the pine nuts inside its cones, both of which took centuries of selective planting to produce the tree people now picture as wild. A tree this size at this age has grown fast even by the species' own standards, likely helped by open ground and full sun in a small village rather than competition in a planted stand. Reaching it from central Cordoba means the Aucorsa L-T bus, about nineteen minutes, but the line runs only a handful of times a day, so check the timetable before building a trip around it. Nobody has published a closer account of exactly where in the village it stands. If you have seen it, tell us.