Lightning hit it in 1991 and it is still here and still growing. La Reina is a giant sequoia in the gardens of the royal palace at La Granja, and the numbers show the growth plainly: the regional register measured it at 42.5 metres in 2006 and Patrimonio Nacional now gives it 46, which is what a healthy sequoia does with twenty years. It carries a lightning conductor now. It stands with a companion, El Rey, in front of the palace collegiate church, and both are over 40 metres, which puts them among the tallest trees in Spain. There is nothing native about either. Sequoiadendron giganteum reached Europe in 1853 as seed out of California, and within a decade every estate that could afford one had ordered it, so almost all of Europe's tallest trees are the same generation of planted specimens standing in gardens. The garden they stand in was begun in the 1720s for Philip V, who wanted a Versailles in the Guadarrama foothills and got a French formal layout with a mountain behind it, and its conifers went in through the nineteenth century. Nobody publishes an age for this tree.
This tree looks much the same in every month of the year, so there is no season to chart.
Alameda del Medio Punto, Jardines de La Granja, Real Sitio de San Ildefonso 40100, SegoviaYou can recognise it by the lightning conductor fitted after a 1991 strike, standing beside its companion tree in front of the collegiate church. It stands on the Alameda del Medio Punto, La Granja.
In the gardens of the royal palace at La Granja, open to visitors; the palace is a separate ticket and the fountains run only on set days
Bus from Segovia to La Granja, about 20 minutes, then into the gardens
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- In the official register: Árboles Notables de Castilla y León (Junta de Castilla y León), no. AS-SG-07
- patrimonionacional.es
- medioambiente.jcyl.es
- Junta de Castilla y Leon, Arboles Notables (IDECyL, espaciosnaturales), no. AS-SG-07