The Alzina d'en Pere

This holm oak grew up alone, and its whole shape comes from that. With nothing crowding it, it built a crown the Balearic register calls well balanced, about 19 metres across on a tree 19 to 20 metres tall, over a trunk 118 centimetres thick at chest height, which is roughly 3.7 metres round. The register puts it at about 500 years old, and the honest way to read that is somewhere between four and six centuries, because a figure like that is an estimate and not a count of rings. Holm oaks keep their leaves through the winter, so the dome you find in January is the same one you would find in July. It stands on the Finca pública de Binifaldo, a 377-hectare public estate with signposted walking trails and a mountain refuge, near the Binifaldo houses and off the old road from Lluc to Pollença. The entrance is at kilometre 17.4 of the Ma-10. That makes it the easiest of the old trees around Lluc to turn into a proper walk rather than a roadside stop. It belongs to a small cluster. The monastery of Lluc and its hackberry are about three kilometres away, and the seven-limbed Alzina dels Set Cimals a little further on the same road. A car, or the seasonal bus from Palma, is how most people will string the three together into one morning in the Serra de Tramuntana.