The Dragon Tree of Icod de los Vinos, in Tenerife, is the oldest specimen of Dracaena Drago, which is preserved in the Atlantic archipelago, a tree 16 m high with a 20 m circumference at the base. An endemic species of the Canary Islands, with a slow growth, the dragon tree has a strong symbolism since, in the past, it was considered the protector of the islands, but, at the beginning of the 1980s, the one who needed protection was precisely the dragon tree. Visitors - about 1 million a year - flocked to visit it, and the intense activity that tourism brought around it put its life in danger. It was necessary to stop the visits and find solutions so that the drago tree did not die of success.
When scientific congresses began to talk about "biodiversity" and "renaturation of urban environments", but they were not yet mainstream concepts, the entry of a team of three young architects - Felipe Artengo, Fernando Menis and José María Rodríguez Pastrana - proposed a slow process of ecological restoration, which won the international public design competition called for this site located in the small town of Icod de los Vinos, at the insistence of a number of biologists and botanists concerned about the health of the Dragon Tree. What happened next is that the Dragon Tree Park has become one of the most important interventions in the Canary Islands in terms of the conservation and restoration of the biodiversity of a space, a ravine in this case.
