The Wild Pear of El Cisterer

Catalonia protects 299 trees and one of them is a wild pear, which tells you something about how the list was made. Pyrus spinosa is a thorny scrubby thing of dry Mediterranean hillsides, usually a bush and rarely worth a second look, and this one is 10.5 metres tall with a trunk just under two metres round and a crown 16 metres across, which for the species is enormous. It stands at Cap del Plans above Prades, on the right of the track, in the Prades mountains where the ground is red sandstone and the villages sit above 900 metres. It was declared a monumental tree in 1991. The register puts its condition as normal. What makes it worth the drive is not size in absolute terms, since almost every other tree on this site is bigger, but the fact that this is the species performing at the top of its range: a hedgerow shrub that got left alone long enough to become a tree. The register itself gives no age, as with every Catalan entry; the 75 to 150 years shown here is judged from the girth.