Menorca is an island and this is not a walk. Four registered trees spread across it, a car and most of a day between them. The one to plan around is a holm oak of four to five hundred years in its own wood beside the car park for Cala del Pilar, where the Cami de Cavalls comes past. The other three: a pine half again as wide as it is tall at the entrance to Cala Galdana, four plane trees at a hermitage above the port of Mao, and the last of three roadside pines near Ferreries. All free.
0 of 4 visited in Menorca
1
Alzina d'Alfuri de Dalt
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · roughly 400-500 years · Alfuri de Dalt, Ciutadella
The oldest tree on Menorca is ten metres tall and stands beside a beach car park. The Balearic catalogue of singular trees puts this holm oak at 400 to 500 years, which is an unusually old and unusually specific figure for a holm oak anywhere in the Balearics, and it has spent those centuries thickening rather than climbing: 3.9 metres round at chest height, 4.1 metres at the foot, and a crown covering about 176 square metres over a trunk you would need three people to reach around.
It was already a mature tree when the British took Menorca in 1708 and began a century of the island changing hands. It is not alone either. It stands in a wood of centuries-old holm oaks growing on sandy soil over a fossil dune, which is a strange bed for an oak and part of why the land around it was expropriated in 1999 and now belongs to the state.
Be honest with yourself before you go: the register records structural damage, low vitality and a crown that is dying back at the top, and nobody has published a condition check since. Park at Cala del Pilar, walk into the wood beside the car park. The Cami de Cavalls passes the same point.
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2
Platers de l'Ermita de Sant Joan des Verger
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 100-150 years · Sant Joan, Mao
Tradition says a king heard mass on this spot in 1287. These trees were not there. Alfons III landed near Mao that year to take Menorca, and local tradition, repeated by the island's own tourist authority and by the tree register, holds that mass was said at the hermitage of Sant Joan des Verger to mark it. Nothing is thought to survive of that medieval building. What stands now is a later chapel, a big stone washtub, a crossing of old field paths, and four plane trees that are 100 to 150 years old, which makes them the newcomers by about six centuries.
At 31 to 37 metres they also tower over everything else on this page. The register measured them in 2010, with trunks between 2.3 and 4.1 metres round and canopies covering 300 to 400 square metres between them, and noted the roots running visibly out across an old paved area. Verger means market garden, and the fertile plots around here are what gave the place its name.
The town of Mao owns the site, it is free and open ground, and the walk out from the centre takes about 20 minutes on public tracks near the harbour.
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3
Pi de Cala Galdana
Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) · roughly 100-150 years · Cala Galdana, Ferreries
This pine's canopy is 25 metres across and the tree itself is only 16 metres tall, so it is half again as wide as it is high. The register explains the shape in one line: it grew without competitors. An Aleppo pine in a wood spends its life racing its neighbours upward. This one had nothing to race, so it went sideways instead, throwing four primary branches out from about two metres up and roofing over some 350 square metres of ground.
It also has the least likely address on this page. It stands beside the roundabout at the entrance to Cala Galdana, where the road drops down to the cove, and generations of people arriving for the summer have passed it on the way in. The town of Ferreries owns it, and the Balearic government catalogued it in January 2001, measuring the trunk at 3.9 metres round.
That address makes it the easiest tree on this page to see. You do not have to walk anywhere, the pavement runs past it, and in summer the bus to Cala Galdana stops at the same roundabout. Whether you stop and look up is a different question, which is rather the point of this list.
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4
Pi Ver del Doctor Camps
Stone Pine (Pinus pinea) · roughly 150 years · Sa Mola, Ferreries
Three pines were planted here. One is left, and we cannot tell you whether it is still standing. The Balearic register catalogued the group in 1992 and recorded that they had gone in about 120 years earlier, planted by Francesc Camps i Mercadal, the town doctor of Es Migjorn Gran, a folklorist who wrote under the name Marques d'Albranca and died in 1929. One of the three had already died and been felled by the time of that survey. The register's own vitality count then lists one of the remaining pair as dead too, which leaves this one.
In 2003 it was found seriously affected by an insect pest, and the register says plainly that the infestation was likely to prove fatal eventually. No source since has said what happened. That is why this tree sits at the bottom of the list rather than off it: what was recorded is a stone pine 20 metres tall, four metres round at chest height, with a canopy 18 metres across, on the verge of the Me-20 between Ferreries and Es Migjorn Gran.
If you drive that road, look at the verge and tell us what is there. A photograph would settle it, and this page would change the same week.
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