The Castano Santo

Christian troops heard mass at the foot of this chestnut before going to fight, and that is where the name comes from: the holy chestnut. The mass was said in the sixteenth century, before a battle with the Moriscos, the Muslims of these mountains who had been forced to convert and who rose against Spain twice. The tree is the largest on this page by a wide margin. Its trunk measures 14.65 metres round at chest height and 21.5 metres at the base, it stands 24.5 metres tall, and the two enormous main limbs carry a crown covering 510 square metres. The register puts the age at possibly around 800 years and has proposed the tree as a Natural Monument of Andalusia. It sits on a ledge on an east-facing slope in dense woodland of cork oaks and Algerian oaks with other chestnuts scattered through it, on land where pigs are still run out to feed on acorns, and somebody has built a low stone wall behind it to stop erosion undercutting the roots. The land is private, but the tree stands a few metres from a public bridle path.