In the heart of the Sicani Mountains, along the slope of provincial road 36 that connects Santa Caterina to Cassero, stands silently a masterpiece of nature that has remained hidden from the scientific world for centuries. In the municipal area of Castronovo di Sicilia, in the Metropolitan City of Palermo at an altitude of 910 metres, what experts believe to be the largest living bitter almond tree in the world has been documented.
An exceptional monumental specimen, not only for its imposing height of 10 meters and its crown of 15 meters in diameter, but above all for a spiral trunk with a circumference of 5.20 meters which is divided into three large main branches. If the average life of a plant of this species normally varies between 70 and 80 years, the estimates conducted on this giant attest to an extraordinary age of around 500 years, transforming it into a true living fossil of the Sicilian agricultural landscape.
@Notebooks of Environmental and Applied Botany
The studies of botanists and the traces of peasant history in the trunk
The scientific relevance of the discovery was made official by the study signed by botanists Pasquale Marino and Francesco Maria Raimondo, published in the scientific journal Notebooks on Environmental and Applied Botanypublished by the PLANTA research center. The data that emerged largely exceeds the measurements of all 39 monumental almond trees currently registered in the international Monumental Trees register and distributed in seven different countries.
In addition to the unique botanical properties and the constant production of bitter seeds, the plant preserves evidence of human work on its lichen-covered bark: an old wooden ladder literally incorporated into the wood together with rusty metal wires, silent witnesses of decades of traditional harvests and of the profound anthropic interaction in this area frequented since indigenous and Hellenistic times.
From Cappadocia to local protection: the Municipality’s strategy
The scientific significance of the discovery will soon cross national borders to be officially presented at the XVIII International Congress of Mediterranean Botany, scheduled for the end of September in Cappadocia, Turkey. In conjunction with the global academic debate, local institutions have already taken action to protect this natural gem.
The mayor of Castronovo di Sicilia, Vitale Gattuso, has in fact announced his desire to immediately start a process of protection and valorization, promoting interventions aimed at the conservation of the tree, in order to protect local biodiversity and transform the giant of the Sicani Mountains into an identity symbol for nature tourism in the Palermo hinterland.
