In 2016 Spain voted for its Tree of the Year, and the winner was a pine you have to climb a gorge to see. The Pino del Aprisquillo stands beside the Arroyo del Aprisquillo in the Charco de la Hoya, below the Cerro de la Escusa, in the eastern foothills of the Sierra de Gredos. The next year it carried Spain's colours in European Tree of the Year, one of sixteen national candidates. It is a Spanish black pine, Pinus nigra subsp. salzmannii, which people in La Adrada call cascalbo for its pale bark. The measurements depend on who took them. Its girth is given as anything from five metres to 5.9 at the base, its height mostly between 25 and 30 metres, and one outlying report says 43. Its age comes out the same way: about 400 years in one account, over 400 in another, 350 in a third. Call it three and a half to four and a half centuries, and nobody has counted the rings. In that time, a regional paper wrote when it won, it has come through plagues, fires and every other hardship a mountain pine meets. Getting there is part of it. Two marked routes climb from the valley, roughly ten kilometres there and back with about 630 metres of ascent, and the last stretch can be overgrown. The village put up new signs for this route in 2023.
Beside the Arroyo del Aprisquillo in the Garganta/Charco de la Hoya gorge, below the Cerro de la Escusa, La Adrada, Avila province, Castilla y Leon You can recognise it by the trunk, five to six metres round, on a black pine 25 to 30 metres tall with pale bark. It stands beside the Arroyo del Aprisquillo in the Charco de la Hoya gorge, below the Cerro de la Escusa.
Free, on public forest tracks. Two marked hiking routes reach it (from the road to the Colmenilla dam, or via Canto de la Linde), both with real elevation gain (roughly 630m over a 10km round trip per rutinasvarias); one alternative interior trail is described as not fully signposted. The municipality installed new trail signage for this specific route in November 2023, and a 2024 hiker reported the final stretch overgrown, so the walk is real but rougher than a park path.
Rural Avila province; no public transport reaches the trailhead. La Adrada is about 85km southwest of Madrid (published) and roughly 45km from Avila city; a car to the village, then the hike, is the only realistic route.