It grows like a candelabrum, which a fir is not supposed to do. The trunk of this pinsapo is only 60 centimetres long before it forks in two, and one of those two then splits again into three, so what stands on the hillside above the Puerto de La Perra is a twisted branching thing rather than the single straight spire the species normally makes. The register measures 5.10 metres round below the fork and nearly 8 at the base, on a tree 22 metres high. Firs are pruned into that shape by damage, wind or snow load or a lost leader, and the result is a specimen worth the walk precisely because it is wrong. It stands near a path and a mountain stream cutting the northeast slope of the Chaparral hill, with other pinsapos around it and, in the understorey, quejigos of Quercus alpestris, an oak endemic to this range and nowhere else. The land is public and inside the natural park. Nobody has published an age for it, which for a tree of this shape is a real gap: if you know one, tell us.
Puerto de La Perra, Tolox 29109, Malaga, in the Sierra de las NievesYou can recognise it by its candelabrum shape, forking low into two and then three trunks instead of one straight spire. It stands above the Puerto de La Perra.
Free, public land inside the Sierra de las Nieves, near a footpath and a stream
Tolox, about 40 km east of Ronda, then on foot toward the Puerto de La Perra
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
