The Mata de Bellver

Pistacia lentiscus is a shrub almost everywhere it grows, a low, dense presence in Mediterranean scrubland that most walkers step past without a glance. Left alone for a century, on the right ground, it can do something else entirely: this specimen, growing just south of the outer wall of Castell de Bellver, has pushed up four vertical trunks and taken on the size and shape of a proper tree, which is exactly why the Balearic government catalogued it among the islands' singular specimens. It stands in the Parc Forestal de Bellver, the pine forest that wraps around the fourteenth century circular castle on its hill above the city. The castle itself keeps a ticket booth and opening hours; the forest around it, waymarked with walking trails, does not, so the mata is free to visit whether or not you go inside the walls. There is nothing dramatic in its numbers, no record height or girth. Its interest is entirely in the exception it represents: the ordinary Mediterranean shrub that had the ground and the time to become something else.