The Araucaria are magnificent.
We first encountered Araucaria in Parque Villarrica and again in Parque Nahuelbuta. I felt like a kid again; with all of the open mouthed wonderment of discovering something entirely new. But the Araucaria is rather like a platypus; seemingly assembled from a bizarre assortment of parts, but entirely new and fascinating as a whole.
The Araucaria has a trunk as straight and tall as the New Zealand Kauri, though not so massive a girth. The age of these trees also rival the Kauri but the tuft of green at the top is rather more ferocious.
At regular intervals, four or five snake-like branches sprout from the trunk, wending outwards and upwards like Medusa on a bad hair day (replete with split ends). Each cylindrical branch is in fact a profusion of flat green radial spines.
From a distance, the Araucaria resembles a long slender toadstool. From beneath, the canopy is like a palm at first glance. The bark however, is something else again. On the larger trees, the bark breaks into irregular plates with deep fissures, rather like dried mud, or the bark of a cork tree. The bark lends fire resistance to the tree's survival arsenal in the vicinity of volcanoes