At 44 metres this is the second tallest tree in Seville's own survey of its singular trees, a conifer from a single small island in the Pacific standing taller than almost anything else the city ha...
Norfolk Island Pine
Araucaria heterophylla
The entire species comes from one Pacific island eight kilometres long, and it now stands over port cities from Hobart to the Atlantic coast of Portugal. We map 10 of them, in 10 cities.
Araucaria heterophylla grows in regular tiers, a candelabra of horizontal branches on a dead straight stem, which is why it reads as a tree drawn by a child and why nineteenth century gardeners could not resist it. Height is usually the point. The Malaga specimen, around 200 years old, is the tallest in its province; Barcelona's clears 27 metres above one of the most densely built neighbourhoods in Europe; Sintra's is the tallest tree at Monserrate. Setubal has six of them at 26 metres, standing in a ring around one old circular stone tank with a fountain in the middle. Hobart's is the one nearest home, and a local nurseryman asked in 2025 to name his favourite tree in the city picked it.
Seville
Alicante
A Norfolk Island Pine is neither a pine nor from anywhere near Spain.
Barcelona
A tree from a Pacific island eight kilometres long stands 27 metres over one of the most densely built neighbourhoods in Europe.
Sintra
The tallest tree in one of Portugal's most exotic gardens came from an island most of its visitors couldn't place on a map.
Photo: Eduarda7 (CC BY-SA 2.5 PT)
Sydney
A plaque on the trunk explains that this tree will never reach the grandeur of the one it replaced, because a storm damaged its crown soon after it was planted.
Valencia
Burjassot has two officially monumental trees, and one of them is dead.
Malaga
Araucaria heterophylla has been growing on earth since the Triassic, more than 200 million years, long enough to have shared the planet with the first dinosaurs, though the specimen standing beside...
Photo: Daniel Capilla (dcapillae) (CC BY-SA)
Palermo
Thirty-five metres from Villa Tasca's Cook pine stands a second, easily confused conifer: a Norfolk Island pine, four metres eighty around, growing in the same lakeside garden.
Hobart
Asked in 2025 to name his favourite tree in Hobart, the owner of the New Town Station Nursery picked this one, and his reason was that it never changes much.
Setubal
Six trees stand in a ring around one old circular stone tank with a fountain at its middle, and at twenty-six metres they are the tallest classified trees in the city.
Explore by city: Seville · Alicante · Barcelona · Sintra · Sydney · Valencia · Malaga · Palermo · Hobart · Setubal · every city · or browse all species.