Alzina d'Alfuri de Dalt

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.