El Drago Milenario

El Drago Milenario (The Thousand-Year-Old Dragon) is a dragon tree (Dracaena draco) in northern Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

It’s over 16m tall with a 20m circumference and believed (disputed) to be 1,000 years old, making it the oldest and largest of its type. Its estimated mass is 140 tonnes.

Dragon trees are subtropical and native to the Canaries, Cape Verde, Madeira and western Morocco. They grow slowly with dense branch structure, producing white flowers, round orange fruit and a red sap once likened to dragon blood.

A symbol of Tenerife, ‘El Drago’ was declared a national monument in 1917. Prior to Spain’s adoption of the euro, it appeared on the penultimate version of the 1,000 peseta note. It’s also one of the island’s two natural icons, along with the Tenerife blue chaffinch (Fringilla teydea).

In 1993 the adjacent road was rerouted to protect this famous tree, with Parque del Drago becoming a biodiversity conservation and restoration area. Local authorities created a three-hectare garden of endemic species around El Drago, including cactus spurge and smaller fellow specimens.

According to local legend the Guanches (indigenous people) used to gather under the branches to perform sacred rituals. They also performed mummification for higher social classes.

The Socotra dragon or dragon blood tree (Dracaena cinnibari) is a relative that grows on the Yemeni island of Socotra, over 7,000 km away.

Image by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net), own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

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