Jurassic Bark

There is no more potent symbol for Chileans of the beauty and mystery of their verdant south than the Araucaria tree.

From its cracked stone-grey bark which seems closer to a dragon’s monstrous scales or a chunk of granite rock than anything plant-like, to its peculiarly symmetrical spiny branches flailing against the sky, it looks like no other tree growing today.

Instead, it looks like a Jurassic survivor from a much earlier stage of evolution and one can easily imagine that dinosaurs once prowled between its primal, upright trunks.

That may be because when the makers of the BBC´s Walking with Dinosaurs series were looking for a suitably prehistoric landscape to film backgrounds for their computer-generated monsters, they settled on parts of the Araucaria Andina near Lonquimay.
Although found in mixed woods of native species, its preference for higher altitudes (it generally grows above 800 meters) means that it is frequently founding growing exclusively with other araucarias, often as the forest peters out just below the tree line.
The trees can grow up to fifty meters high and live for up to one thousand years, meaning many of the specimens that dominate the woods today may well have been saplings at the time of the Spanish conquest.

Once common throughout the highlands of Patagonia, constant depredation over recent centuries (its wood is valued by builders for being light, strong and easy to work) has seen its habitat in Chile reduced to the Andes mountains between the Antuco and Villarica volcanoes as well as a small area on the coastal Nahuelbuta range.
Today the species is protected, not only through a series of national parks and reserves but by law prohibiting its exploitation.

This has led to difficulties Chile´s indigenous Pehuenche people for whom the Araucaria represents the basis of the traditional way of life.

Indeed, their name derives the pehuén, the Araucaria´s nut-like fruit, which the Penhuenche use in a range of foodstuffs, including soups and salads as well as milling it into flour to make bread and cakes.

Easy to spot in its fibrous pinkish shell on a forest floor littered with the Araucaria´s dried scales, the pehuén makes for a tasty snack for hikers in the region’s woods, its chewy, nutty flesh is sweet with a tangy aftertaste.