This tree bleeds red.
Photo: Dguendel (CC BY 4.0)
Dragon Tree
Dracaena draco
Nobody can date a dragon tree, and that is the species rather than sloppy record keeping. We map 12 of them, in 8 cities.
Dracaena draco lays down no annual rings, so every age here is an estimate and some are wide open: Tenerife's Drago Milenario is put near 700 years by a modern study and at a thousand or more by tradition, and the tree in the Parque Genoves in Cadiz anywhere between 100 and 200. The name comes from the sap. Cut into the bark and the resin that runs out is dark red, sold across Europe for centuries as dragon's blood, a dye and a medicine. Shape is the other reason to go. An old dragon tree spreads into a low dome of blunt branch tips, and the one at the Quinta Conde dos Arcos in Lisbon is more than twice as wide as it is tall.
Lisbon
This dragon tree is more than twice as wide as it is tall: 6.2 metres of height under a crown almost 14 metres across, on a trunk 4.75 metres round.
Photo: DiogoBaptista (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Nobody can tell you how old this tree is, and that is a property of the species rather than a gap in the paperwork.
Photo: Dguendel (CC BY 4.0)
Cagliari
Cut a dragon tree and it bleeds.
Palermo
This tree bleeds, or its close relatives do: cut into a dragon tree's bark and the sap that runs out is dark red, sold for centuries across Europe as sangue di drago, dragon's blood, a dye and woun...
Photo: FrankAdamo, via Wikimedia Commons (Wiki Loves Monuments) (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A Bourbon king built a Chinese pavilion in Sicily, and the dragon tree standing in front of it has outlasted every reason he had for doing so.
Palermo's largest dragon tree stands in a garden centre.
Cadiz
Cadiz used to have two famous dragon trees, then a storm took the roof off the wrong one.
Photo: Bruno Peixoto (brunopy) (CC BY 4.0)
Catania
Two dragon trees flank the marble staircase of the botanical garden's neoclassical building.
Madeira
The Regional Government of Madeira bought this piece of land for one reason: the trees standing on it.
Photo: Paulo SP/ Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Menorca
Nobody has to estimate this one.
Tenerife
Nobody can date this tree, and nobody is going to.
Photo: Андрей Колычев (CC BY 3.0)
Explore by city: Lisbon · Cagliari · Palermo · Cadiz · Catania · Madeira · Menorca · Tenerife · every city · or browse all species.