El Drago Milenario

Nobody can date this tree, and nobody is going to. Dracaena draco lays down no annual growth rings, so the standard method of reading a trunk fails on it completely, and the estimates fill the vacuum accordingly: current scientific work puts El Drago Milenario near 700 years with a margin of a century or more either way, while tradition, the tourist literature and the tree's own name insist on a thousand or more. The name is a claim, not a measurement. What can actually be measured is everything else. The base is about 20 metres around, the tree stands 18 to 21 metres tall depending on who did the measuring, and the crown spreads roughly 20 metres across on more than 300 primary branches, which together make it the largest and oldest known living specimen of its species anywhere. Spain declared it a national monument in 1917. It has needed help since: conservators opened it up in 1985 to install internal ventilation against fungal rot, and in 1993 the road that ran past it was moved to spare it exhaust fumes and passing hands. The sap runs red when the bark is cut, the dragon's blood that Europe once bottled as dye and medicine. It stands in Icod de los Vinos, in a park built around it in 1996, partly visible from the street and properly visible only from inside.