SAN FRANCISCO DRAGON TREE

Then, after an amusing walk, the descent reaches the road Viera y Clavijo, called that way since it was in the number 101 of that road where the illustrious writer was born. The road to the San Francisco dragon tree is short. We find there the graveyard of San Fransisco de Asis, which is placed in the missing Santa Lucia monastery of Franciscan order ,built at the beginning of the XVII century and destroyed by the effect of fire in 1865.Inside its walls it is raised the stonework door of that monastery.

The San Francisco dragon tree, placed in an upper part, where El Medio and Cruz

Verde roads converge, is after the dragon tree of Icod de los Vinos, the most beautiful in the Canary Islands. About it, travellers and writers from other ages have said that “ its appearance is strange, it could be said it is as a huge candelabrum standing up a yucca forest. It is certainly one of the strangest vegetables in all the creation and many have believed to have seen under its cover ,the image of the dragon of the fable , guardian of the gold apples from the “Hesperides Garden’’. From the gardens surrounding this magnificent specimen the view does never disappoint. On side, a part of the municipality of Los Realejos and its neighbouring town Puerto de la Cruz; on the other, the mountains and the hillside of Tigaiga, which ends in the mouth of the ravine.