Aleppo pines are the trees that come back after fire, their cones prised open by the heat, colonising burnt Mediterranean hillsides faster than anything else growing on them.
Aleppo Pine
Pinus halepensis
An Aleppo pine keeps its cones locked shut on the branch for years and opens them with heat, so the fire that kills the tree sows the next generation of it. We map 20 of them, in 12 cities.
It is the pine of the Mediterranean's dry hillsides, and the old ones mostly stand where somebody decided to keep them. Nice owes a whole forest to it: when the city became French in 1860 the slopes of Mont Boron were bare rock, and the replanting begun in 1862 is the pine wood you walk through today. Trieste's Miramare park protects six within three hundred metres of each other. Bari's Pine of Carrassi is close to six metres round, though one botanical survey calls it a stone pine. And in Canberra the Lone Pine of the Australian War Memorial grew from a cone a sergeant picked up at Gallipoli in 1915 and carried home.
Barcelona
Rome
Villa Celimontana keeps two of Rome's officially monumental trees within a few meters of each other, and this Aleppo pine is the more unusual of the pair.
Cagliari
Two Aleppo pines stand at the doorstep of one of Sardinia's most important Romanesque churches, in the small town of Dolianova, about 23 minutes from Cagliari by regional train.
Madrid
This pine grows in the gardens spread beneath the Royal Palace's western facade, a formal landscape that took its current shape only in the 1890s even though the land had belonged to the crown for...
Florence
An Aleppo pine keeps its cones sealed on the branch for years and opens them with heat, so the fire that kills the tree sows the next generation.
Bari
A branch on this Aleppo pine broke off in a heavy snowfall about two decades ago, and Bari's foresters simply cut the stump flush and left the rest standing, close to six metres round at the trunk.
Trieste
The biggest of Miramare's six protected Aleppo pines is also the one nobody has put a date on.
Fifteen metres from the largest Aleppo pine at Miramare stands the second largest, and the gap between them is 34 centimetres of girth and five metres of height.
This pine is thicker than three of its protected neighbours and lower than all but one of them.
The slimmest of Miramare's five big Aleppo pines is as tall as the fattest.
The smallest tree in Miramare's protected pine grove is barely a third of the height of the park's redwoods.
Six Aleppo pines in this park carry the same protection, all within three hundred metres of each other, and this is not the largest of them.
The park came with a condition attached to it.
Trieste keeps a plan for the day its biggest trees come down.
Nice
This entire forest exists because a 19th century engineer refused to give up on bare rock.
Canberra
The most famous pine in Australia was born from a soldier's pocket.
Photo: Bidgee (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Ibiza
Somebody once nailed a hunting ban to this pine.
Mallorca
This Aleppo pine carries a lightning scar more than a hand wide along the base of its trunk, and that is not the strangest thing about it.
Menorca
This pine's canopy is 25 metres across and the tree itself is only 16 metres tall, so it is half again as wide as it is high.
This pine lost a branch in 2025, and that single line in its register file is the freshest proof on this page that any of these trees is still standing.
Explore by city: Barcelona · Rome · Cagliari · Madrid · Florence · Bari · Trieste · Nice · Ibiza · Menorca · every city · or browse all species.