Parque de las Presillas, Urban park in Alcorcón, Spain.
Parque de las Presillas is a large urban park in Alcorcón, a city just southwest of Madrid, featuring a stone pine forest and a grove of cork oak trees that are over 100 years old. The terrain alternates between dense woodland and more open clearings with varied ground cover.
The land functioned as a military farm until the early 1990s, when Alcorcón's city council took it over during the construction of the nearby M-40 highway. That change ended its agricultural use and opened the area to the public for the first time.
The cork oak grove is one of the last remnants of the native vegetation that once covered the land around Madrid. Walking through this part of the park, visitors can see the thick, gnarled trunks up close and understand why local residents treat this area with particular care.
The park sits between several neighborhoods and can be reached on foot from different sides of the city. Going in the morning or late afternoon tends to be more comfortable, as traffic noise from the surrounding roads is less noticeable at those times.
The cork oaks here are officially registered by Spain's Ministry of Agriculture as a native seed source used in forest replanting projects across the region. This means trees growing in other parts of Madrid today may well trace their origin back to this grove.
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