😃 Hello, Steemians Brothers and Sisters of planet Earth. I am pleased to introduce you the Bucare tree: 😃

I took this series of photos of the trunk, roots and branches of a Bucare with my old Samsung phone on an abandoned coffee plantation as I walked with the members of the Caracas Excursionist Center down to the old town of La Guaira, whose port opens to the Caribbean Sea and which we reached by following the old Camino de los Españoles, Spanish Trail, which goes from Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, to the port city through what is now the Waraira Repano National Park.... Here is a detail of the roots that stand out from the earth:

A good part of the strip of what constitutes the cloudy jungle of the park, located between seven hundred and two thousand meters above sea level, is an area suitable for the cultivation of coffee, being the most cultivated species in America, the Coffea arabica, which was first planted in Venezuela by Catholic missionaries in 1730 around the river Caroní. By 1780 it was being cultivated in Santiago de León de Caracas, specifically in the Blandín hacienda in Chacao. Little by little plantations were established in the heights of the mountains to the north of the city. When it was created in it, on December 12, 1958, the national park, many plants remained in wild state, as happened with the specimen that can be appreciated in the center of the following photo:

The Bucare, whose genus is Erythrina and which has a wide variety of species, is one of the largest trees in Venezuela as it can exceed thirty meters in height and more than one meter in diameter, as can be seen in the photo above in which my friend Kristel appears to serve as a reference and as a beautiful model. She is another Venezuelan who is not in our country, but in his case is because she was awarded a scholarship by the Kingdom of Spain to do a Doctorate in Linguistics. A big hug for her, beautiful and intelligent!

The Bucare is traditionally used, along with other species such as the Guamo, a fruit tree, or the cedar, whose wood is very appreciated, to shade the coffee and cocoa plantations, which require shaded areas for better growth as the direct sun affects them to be "shade crops". When its flowering takes place, generally in the most intense part of the summer, it is a spectacle to see its branches, which have lost their leaves, covered with beautiful inflorescences, whose colors go from the light orange to the scarlet red and that present very picturesque forms.

For many centuries, giant bucares, like the one above, have been custodians or elder brothers of coffee plantations. Venezuela became one of the first five producers of very good coffee in the world before the boom in oil exploitation... Ironically, at present it is one of the most difficult basic items to find and whose cost can reach more than three minimum monthly wages for a kilogram of powdered coffee.