The Bizarre, Ancient Araucaría Trees That Populate One of Chile’s Most Fascinating Ski Regions

To see an araucaría tree, also known as a monkey puzzle tree, is to gaze eyes upon a survivor from the Jurassic period of Planet Earth; these trees have been around for hundreds of million years, since well before Pangea split up.

Growing along the volcanic slopes of south-central Chile and Argentina, this ancient conifer looks less like a standard pine tree and more like a candidate for an alien landscape or a prehistoric artifact. Its thick, geometric branches radiate outward in symmetrical whorls, covered entirely in stiff, triangular, razor-sharp leaves that overlap like scale armor. Botanists routinely classify the tree as a “living fossil,” tracing its lineage back over 200 million years to the Early Jurassic period when ancestral Araucaría species dominated the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana. The tree’s menacing, spike-encased foliage is an evolutionary defense mechanism once tailored to deter browsing by long-extinct sauropod dinosaurs.

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The underlying biology of the tree is equally unusual. The species is dioecious, meaning individual trees are strictly male or female. Female trees produce massive, football-sized cones that require 18 months to mature before releasing up to 200 starch-rich seed called “piñones.” Every two to five years, entire forests coordinate in synchronized “masting” events, showering the forest floor in heavy seed crops. Araucaria araucana is also one of the longest-lived plant species on Earth, growing at a glacial pace and refusing to produce seeds until reaching 30 or 40 years of age. In Conguillío National Park, an ancient specimen dubbed the “Araucaría Madre” is signposted at roughly 1,800 years old, while a 2017 dendrochronological study led by researchers from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso officially tree-ring dated an individual near Laguna Captrén at 1,021 years old — marking Patagonia’s first scientifically confirmed millennium-age tree.

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Beyond its ancient botany, the tree sits at the center of a rich cultural cosmology. Known as the pehuén in Mapudungun, the tree gives its name to the Pehuenche people (“people of the pehuén”), an Indigenous branch of the Mapuche who have inhabited these Andean valleys for millennia. Each autumn between March and May, Pehuenche families scale the thick, grooved trunks like ladders for the “piñoneo,” an ancestral harvest of the tree’s piñones. Traditionally accounting for up to 15 percent of their seasonal diet, the seeds remain a vital winter carbohydrate. The tree is regarded as a sacred protector holding a guardian spirit; its shade serves as the site for an altar during sacred ceremonies, and strict spiritual custom dictates that cones should only be collected after falling naturally to avoid disrespecting the tree.

The tree’s peculiar English name, the “monkey puzzle,” stems from a quirky chapter in colonial botany. In 1795, Scottish naval surgeon and botanist Archibald Menzies pocketed raw seeds served as dessert at a dinner hosted by Chile’s colonial governor, nurturing them aboard his ship back to Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Decades later, during an 1850s garden party at Pencarrow House in Cornwall, English barrister Charles Austin remarked that climbing its spiraling, spiky branches “would puzzle a monkey,” bestowing a name that spread across the English-speaking world. While 19 living Araucaría species exist today — including 13 endemic species crammed onto the Pacific island of New Caledonia and Australia’s famous Bunya pine — Chile’s pehuén remains the cold-hardy superstar of the family.

Despite surviving the collapse of the dinosaurs, ice ages, and volcanic eruptions, this living relic faces a modern crisis. Over the past decade, foresters noticed vast stands across Biobío and Araucanía dying from the canopy downward, with up to 90 percent of trees damaged in severe zones. A decade-long investigation culminating in a 2025 study by pathologists from the University of Pretoria, the University of Concepción, and UC Davis Chile finally isolated the culprit: a novel fungal pathogen named Pewenomyces kutranfy — Mapudungun for “pehuén-killer.” The fungus creates sores that ring branches and cut off their water and nutrient supply, teaming up with other diseases to worsen the stress on trees already struggling through a severe ongoing drought in the Andes.

Today, as backcountry skiers carve through snow-dusted araucaría stands surrounding spots like Corralco and Volcán Llaima, the forest feels like a delicate bridge between epochal time and immediate conservation. Listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List and protected under CITES Appendix I as a Chilean Natural Monument, the tree cannot legally be logged. Yet protecting the pehuén requires far more than anti-logging laws; it demands active scientific intervention and Indigenous stewardship to ensure that a 200-million-year-old botanical lineage from the time of the dinosaurs and the human culture intertwined with it do not vanish from the Andes forever.