The Great Pine of Romanya

Thirty and a half metres is very tall for a stone pine, which usually spends its effort going sideways into the flat-topped umbrella everybody recognises. This one went up instead, on a trunk 3.81 metres round with a crown only 18.8 metres across, which is narrow for the height. It stands 330 metres south of Romanya de la Selva, a hamlet on a ridge above the Costa Brava that is best known for what is next to it: the Cova d'en Daina, a megalithic passage grave with a stone circle around it, built somewhere around 3000 BC and one of the best preserved in Catalonia. Whatever this pine's age, the ground it stands on has been a place people go to for five thousand years. Catalonia declared it a monumental tree in 1991 under two names, the Pi Gros d'en Cama and the Pi de Romanya, which is normal for these trees: the register keeps the farm name and the village name side by side because both are in local use. Its condition is recorded as normal and no age is published.