The Araucaria of Quinta Vigia

To see this one you walk into the official residence of the President of the Regional Government of Madeira, and nobody asks you anything at the gate. Quinta Vigia has been the president's house since 1984, and its grounds, about a hectare of them above the seafront on Avenida do Infante, stay open free of charge on weekdays, roughly half past eight until half past five. Monday to Friday only, so this one is a weekday errand. The araucaria in those grounds sits on Funchal's own list of monumental trees, entered as code 292 in a table the city drew from a 2008 regional survey that recorded 118 remarkable specimens across the municipality, 111 of them classed monumental. What the table does not say is which araucaria it is. It gives the genus and stops there. So we cannot tell you either, and we would rather say so than guess. One database files it as a Cook pine and cites nothing whatsoever for the claim; the garden's own description mentions Norfolk Island pine among the exotics growing here. The two are separable from below: a Norfolk Island pine stacks its branches in even tiers, a Cook pine leans in a narrower column. If you are standing under it and you know your araucarias, tell us which one this is. Nobody has recorded its age or its girth either.