The Most Beautiful Green Places: National Park Los Alerces

If you follow me, I’ll take you on an eco-trip around the world, visiting the most beautiful green places of our living planet Earth. The idea is to know the forests and trees that we want to save when we fight for an eco-friendly world to live on.

The first eco-place, will be the National Park Los Alerces in Argentina. You can find it at Chubut province, in the Argentinian Patagonia. It has some of the most beautiful biodiversity in the world, with a wide and rare vegetable variety.

Six lakes are nestled in there. The Lake Futalaufquen, flows to Lake Verde and Menéndez by the Arrayanes river, and Lake Verde flows to Lake Rivadavia by the deep green Rivadavia river.

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At these lakes’ margins we can find forests full of life, with a wide variety of trees. The most beautiful of them are, by far, the Coihues. Then the Cipreses, and at last but not least the Alerces that give name to the Park. The Alerces are thousands of years old. But don’t rush, let’s go step by step.

The park was created in 1937, just to protect those Alerces with thousands of years, because they were being cut down indiscriminately to build wood tiles. The Alerces have a very straight trunk, so they were perfect for construction. And they are hard, strong and don’t putrefy.

Now let’s introduce the trees themselves. The Coihues, as you can see in the photograph, have a really beautiful trunk shape, and they tend to grow wide. They live close to water: lakes, rivers or streams.

The local people used to say that they live a part of their life standing up and the other lying down, because the Coihues have shallow roots, so a strong wind can knock them down. But while they are down, they keep growing, and give life to all around them.

The Alerces are the special guests. They aren’t all around the Park, like the Coihues, you will only find them in El Alerzal, deep down into the forest, and in the well protected area of the Lake Menendez. You can only reach there with national park guides.

If you see one Alerce there, you might say, “this tree it’s only 10 years old,” but in reality you can be standing in front of a 1000 year-old Alerce. That is because they grow so little year by year, only 1 millimeter, so Alerces tend to be really thin.

Today you can find specimens 3622 years old, one of them in Chile. In the Park there are trees around two and three thousand years old, like el abuelo, which is more than two thousand.

But, before they suffered being indiscriminately cut down in the Park, there were living trees 12.6 m in diameter, like the one reported by Charles Darwin. If you calculate, an Alerce with 1 meter in diameter as being at least one thousand years old… good lord, can you imagine? A creature with almost 12,000 years.

If you want to visit these great living creatures, you can travel to the city of Esquel, and from there to one of the best green places of the world.

Photo 2: Flickr

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