Pi de Can Reiet

Somebody once nailed a hunting ban to this pine. The metal plate has since been taken off the trunk, but for a while the tree was doing the work of a signpost on the road north out of Santa Eularia des Riu. It still stands at the kilometre 1.6 marker, close enough to see from the road. Aleppo pine is common all over Ibiza and very little of it reaches this size. The trunk measures 111 centimetres across at the base, which works out at roughly three and a half metres round, on a tree the Balearic register dates at 100 to 150 years. Nobody has narrowed that band further, and if you know when it went in, tell us. It leans. The register describes the crown as unbalanced and inclined, which is why the island council, which owns the tree outright, keeps coming back to take weight out of the branches. A crown that heavy on one side is not a thing you leave to the next storm. It was catalogued as a singular tree on 11 June 1993, on a short list of individual trees the Balearic government protects by name rather than by species. There is no bus stop and no walk up to it. It is a roadside tree about twenty minutes by car from Ibiza Town, and seeing it is a stop rather than an afternoon.