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.
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
In the holm oak wood beside the Cala del Pilar car park, Alfuri de Dalt, Ciutadella, MenorcaYou can recognise it by its thick trunk, 3.9 metres round, and wide crown in a wood of centuries-old holm oaks. It stands beside the Cala del Pilar car park.
Free, standing in a holm oak wood right beside the public car park for Cala del Pilar beach, reached on foot from the parking area or along the Cami de Cavalls coastal path
By car from Ciutadella, roughly 20-25 minutes to the Cala del Pilar car park, then a short walk into the adjoining wood; no public transport reaches this car park
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.