The Norfolk Pine of Vila de Sant Josep
How do I find it? You can recognise it by its shape, a single straight mast 32.5 metres tall carrying flat tiers of branches on a narrow 7.4 metre crown. It stands on the open ground in front of Burjassot metro station.
Burjassot has two officially monumental trees, and one of them is dead. That leaves this Norfolk Island pine, 32.5 metres of it, standing on the open ground in front of the town's metro station. Height alone is what protected it. Burjassot's municipal sustainability office put the tree forward in 2011, and the regional government's technicians concluded that it qualified solo por existir, by its scale alone, as the local paper reported at the time. The trunk is 2.6 metres round and the crown just 7.4 metres wide, which is the shape of the species: a straight mast carrying branches in flat, even tiers. Araucaria heterophylla is not a pine, and it is not from anywhere near here. It comes from Norfolk Island, a single speck of land in the South Pacific. It grows in the grounds of the Vila de Sant Josep, a mansion built for the Basque industrialist Julian Maestre Tome, taken over by the Colegio San Jose in 1918 and seized by the Republic in 1934. Those dates belong to the building. Nobody has dated the tree, and if you know when it went in, tell us. One thing to be clear about: Burjassot is a separate municipality rather than a Valencia neighbourhood. It sits 4.3 km out, about fifteen minutes on Metrovalencia line 1, and the tree is right at the station.
- Species
- Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla)
- Age estimate
- Girth
- 2.6 m
- Location
- Vila de Sant Josep, next to Burjassot metro station (Calle del Maestro Lope), Burjassot (Burjassot (a separate municipality bordering Valencia, about 4.3 km / roughly 15 minutes by Metrovalencia Line 1 from the city centre; day-trip distance, not inside Valencia proper))
- Access
- Free. Stands in the open area in front of Burjassot's Metrovalencia station, part of the Vila de Sant Josep grounds, which reads as public ground bordering the station though no source states outright that it is open. Burjassot is a separate municipality, about 4.3 km and roughly 15 minutes by Metro line 1 from central Valencia.
- Getting there
- Burjassot station, Metrovalencia Line 1, at the tree (about 15 minutes by metro from Valencia's centre)
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Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- valencia-arboles-monumentales (register_id 1954, girth 2.6m, height 32.5m, crown 7.4m)
- elperiodic.com
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