Drive any back road in Ibiza this month and you will pass one without registering it: a fig tree the size of a small marquee, its branches held up off the ground by a scaffolding of forked wooden poles, casting a pool of shade so dense that the earth beneath it stays dry through a rainstorm. Nobody signposts them. There is no entry fee and no queue. And yet these are, along with the island's oldest olives and sabinas, the closest thing Ibiza has to living monuments — older than most of the buildings, older in some cases than the walls of the old town.
September is the month to notice them. The figs are ripe, the almonds have been shaken down, the carobs are turning black on the branch, and the countryside is doing the quiet work it has done for two and a half thousand years while the coast winds down. Here is a local's guide to Ibiza's trees: what they are, why they look the way they do, and where you can see them without trespassing on somebody's farm.
The Propped Fig Trees: Ibiza's Strangest Landmark
The technical name is a figuera estalonada — a propped fig tree — and the practice is called estalonar. Instead of letting a fig grow upward, the farmer trains the branches outward, low and horizontal, and then supports each one on a forked pole cut from sabina or pine. Repeat this over decades and you end up with a tree that is far wider than it is tall, a circular green roof that can span twenty metres or more, with a cool dark room underneath it.
There is nothing decorative about this. It is an elegant piece of engineering that solves three problems at once. Figs bruise, so you want to pick them by hand rather than shake them down, and a horizontal tree puts every fig within arm's reach without a ladder. Branches loaded with fruit snap, so the props take the weight. And the shade underneath — the whole reason a payès would bother — is where the sheep and goats spend the hottest hours of the day, which in turn means the manure lands exactly where the tree wants it.
More than fifty fig varieties have been catalogued across the Balearics, distinguished by leaf shape and by fruit. Farmers sorted them by season and by purpose: the early brevas that come in June, the main August crop, the late ones that hang on into autumn. Some varieties were grown to eat fresh, some specifically to dry for winter, and some purely as animal feed. Ibiza's great poet Marià Villangómez called them figueres d'ombra adormida — fig trees of sleeping shade — which is exactly right if you have ever stood under one at two in the afternoon.
Where to See Them
The propped figs survive best where the old farming landscape survives: inland, and in the north. The plain at Santa Agnès de Corona, the lanes around Sant Mateu d'Albarca and Buscastell, the back roads between Sant Llorenç and Sant Carles, and the wider Es Amunts area all reward slow driving. Take the small unnumbered roads rather than the main arteries, go in the late afternoon when the light rakes across the fields, and be prepared to stop.
One caution that matters: almost every one of these trees stands on private agricultural land. Look from the road, photograph from the road, and do not walk into a field or pick fruit. The trees are somebody's inheritance and somebody's crop. On neighbouring Formentera the same tradition produced a fig so distinctive it was given a name, Na Blanqueta de Can Mestre, catalogued as a unique tree — and even that one is visited from the roadside, because the finca around it is private.
The Island's Catalogued Giants
Ibiza has a formal register of extraordinary trees. The Catalogue of Singular Trees, compiled by the non-profit Bosques Sin Fronteras, lists twenty-two specimens on the island, protected by law on the basis of age, size or cultural importance. Their exact locations are often kept vague on purpose — publicity is not always good for a thousand-year-old root system — but several are known.
The most extraordinary is an olive called n'Espanya, on a farm near Sant Carles, thought to be over a thousand years old and among the longest-lived olive trees in Spain. Its trunk is as wide as the tree is tall, a mass of twisted sinew that was already mature when the island changed hands between empires. Then there is the Pi ver d'en Besuró, a stone pine twelve metres high with a crown spreading twenty-five metres — it takes three adults linking arms to reach around the trunk. The cultural group Colla de Balansat has held traditional ball pagès dances beneath it.
Near Benirràs stands the Bellotera of Can Carreró, an oak, which is not a tree most visitors associate with Ibiza at all: seven metres high, a twenty-metre crown, still producing acorns, with old scars on the trunk where people once stripped bark for medicine. And in Santa Eulalia, near Sa Rota, a cluster of ancient sabinas forms a single arboreal complex — the last of the old-growth generation of the juniper that gave the island its roof beams, its boat ribs and, eventually, its tourist-board logo.
Figs, Almonds and Carobs: Autumn in the Campo
The other reason to care about all this is edible. Before refrigeration, drying figs was how an Ibizan family ate fruit in February. The figs were split and laid out on cane racks in the sun, sometimes packed afterwards with aniseed or fennel and pressed into dense cakes. Figs and apricots dried this way were among the island's first serious food exports — a genuine agricultural industry long before anyone thought of tourism.
Walk the same lanes now and you will see the whole autumn calendar at once. The almond harvest is largely done, though the split husks still litter the ground. The carobs — those long black pods that look like burnt beans — are being gathered, historically for animal feed and now increasingly for flour. And the figs are at their best, which is the single most persuasive argument for pulling over at a roadside farm stand or hitting one of the village mercats pagesos on a weekend morning.
How to Do This Properly
Give it half a day and treat it as a drive rather than a destination. Start inland after breakfast, take the Santa Agnès–Sant Mateu loop, stop at a village bar for a carajillo, and keep going north into Es Amunts. Bring water, because the inland villages shut for lunch and the shops are further apart than you think. Wear something you can walk in — the best views of a propped fig are from a field edge or a track, not a car window.
And go now. The countryside in mid-September is doing something the coast can't match: it's busy, it smells like dust and fig leaves and woodsmoke, and it looks the way this island looked long before anyone arrived for the summer. The trees, at least, are not going anywhere — but the light this month is the best you'll get all year.
Looking for more to do on the island this autumn? Browse the full Ibiza events calendar for markets, village fiestas and everything else happening across the island.
