The Witch Tree of Fanal

The grove these trees belong to was already standing when the Portuguese found Madeira uninhabited in 1419. Fanal is a protected 20-hectare nucleus of til, Ocotea foetens, on the Paul da Serra plateau inside the UNESCO laurel forest, and the island's register dates it only as centenas de anos, hundreds of years, referencing a stand that predates settlement. The eight trunks the surveyors measured run from 0.68 to 2.28 metres round. One tree in it has become the one everybody photographs. Travel and photography sources call it the Witch Tree, arvore da bruxa, for a trunk that twists hard and limbs that read as outstretched arms under a coat of moss. Tourist literature puts it at 500 or 600 years; the register will say no more than hundreds, and neither figure rests on a measurement, so this page does not sharpen it. Nothing on the ground names it. There is no sign, no arrow and no path to the trunk, and visitors regularly report hunting around the grove before they find it, which is why our pin marks the area rather than the tree. Come in the morning fog if you can. That is when Fanal looks the way it does in the photographs, and when the tis stop reading as trees.