The Cedar of Arantzadi

A timber company once wanted to buy this cedar and turn it into toothpicks. The tree is still here because the company went bankrupt first. The story comes from Pamplona's own survey of its old and singular trees, published by the city in 2010, which counts this Cedar of Lebanon among the oldest and grandest trees in Pamplona and puts it at about 200 years. That is the top of the city's range. The same book found Pamplona's trees young on the whole, with the few old ones somewhere between 150 and 200. It stands by the Gurbindo farm in Arantzadi, the loop of the Arga below the old town where the city grows its vegetables, in market gardens the book calls a thousand years old. The name itself is on record from 1291 and means a thicket of thorns. The cedar has kept the gardeners company for about two of those ten centuries. The book measured it at 4.94 metres round at chest height and 27.5 metres tall, with a crown 28 metres across, heavily branched in the flat tiers that set a Cedar of Lebanon apart from its relatives. Another big cedar of the same species stands across from the Arantzadi swimming pools, and the book reckons neither has anything to envy in the declared Natural Monument cedar at the Señorío de Bertiz, north of the city.