Visiting a pine?

Believe it or not, one of the most interesting (and curios) place we visit in our day trip in Summer Session 2 was a Pine!

Students visited a municipality close to Barcelona (Sant Cugat del Vallés) in order to visit the Monastery, one of the best preserved in the region and do a small hike in the woods.  In the Collserolla Hill, we arrived to one of the most emblematic symbols of Sant Cugat (Pi d'en Xandri), which is pine that proofs the importance of ecology and nature in this area.

The Pi d'en Xandri is 23 mtres high and may be around 240 years old. The area in which it is located was bought by a powerful Real State company (Nuñez y Navarro) back in the 90s. There were several attemps to urbanize the are but the neighbors of Sant Cugat stopped them by protesting and organizing demonstrations. Actually, the largest demostration in the history of Sant Cugat was in order to defend this Pi d'en Xandri.

In 1997 the tree was vandalized and unknow people tried to cut it with a chainsaw. Since then the pine is propped and became one of the most important symbols for the local community in Sant Cugat.