It's a lot like home, tree-wise, in Iberia

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, SPAIN » Forty-five summers ago, on my first visit to these parts, my traveling companion Martin Kelley and I wrote a song, with the lyrics in the form of a postcard to a friend: “Dear Lollie, It’s a lot like home

/ with the silver eucalyptus / and the pine trees up above us / and the red, red dirt down below ... in Portugal, they got the tinto wine / in Portugal, they got the radio down fine / oh, yes, it’s a lot like home.”

While we were a few hundred miles south of here back then, this part of Espana Verde is in many ways more like its neighboring country on the Iberian peninsula than it is Castilian, or Basque, or Andalucian — even if all of those sometimes squabbling, sometimes violently so, sibling regions are still parts of a whole. Its ancient language was more Portuguese than Spanish, and Galician — frowned upon by Queen Isabella, banned under Franco — is once again the native tongue, akin to the way that Gaelic is coming back in Ireland and in Scotland as well.

As we drove west from Santander through the fantastically cool-in-summer Cantabria, Asturias and now Galicia, through the rainy and scaryfoggy Picos de Europa mountain range, we noticed, inescapably, a real similarity to my post-college backpacking point-of-view from the song.

The place reminds us of California because of the crazy abundance in the vast forests that cover the landscape of that familiar California presence, the towering eucalyptus tree.

Of course the eucalypts are no more native here than they are in our own backyards. They are all imports, in Iberia as in California, from Australia. What the Aussies call gum trees positively thrive in the climates of both Iberia and on the American West Coast, perhaps even more than they do on their original continent, which is really saying something.

On this trip, we first noticed the trees around Santillana del Mar, home to the ancient cave paintings of Altamira, and then read that the very scholar who spent 20 years convincing the scientific world that the beautiful charcoal and ochre works of art weren’t a modern hoax, but in fact were created by our ancestors, had brought the eucalyptus to Spain, because he thought they looked nice.

And they do. As we Californians know. That’s why the plein-air painters of old Laguna and Pasadena were known as the Eucalyptus School.

In a world plagued by climate change, these beauties are also a terrible, and deadly, problem. As wildfires increase around the globe because of our heating planet, the Aussies are trying to rid their suburbs of gum trees, which are so filled with oils they go off like a bomb when ignited. And in California, while we used them for landscaping and, in rural areas, as wind breaks, at least we don’t much commercially cultivate them. But a little research shows that our perception was not wrong — eucalyptus are now the most widely planted trees in the Galician timber forests that surround this old, holy city, the terminus for pilgrims of the Camino de Santiago. They cover some 800,000 acres here. They grow so much faster than other trees — maturing in just 15 years — that state-run pulp mills encourage their monoculture.

Government, bad. People, good. Thousands of Galicians have joined “de-eucalyptiser brigades,” helping stop the spread of the invasive trees before the eucalyptus-bomb wildfires that have plagued Portugal in recent summers hit Spain too hard as well. And the Galician legislature is joining the cause, pledging to reduce the trees by 5% by 2040. Birds don’t like them, herbivores can’t eat them, they poison the soil. Down with the gum trees! And viva Espana.