The King Tree of the Bimbache: Where Ancient Forests Meet Forgotten Peoples

Chapter One of Wizard of Madeira opens in the Fanal forest, a real place of such otherworldly beauty that it barely needs embellishment. Here, the twisted forms of Ocotea foetens trees emerge from perpetual fog like sculptures carved by time itself. But the chapter does more than describe this botanical wonder; it asks a provocative question: What if the indigenous peoples we call the Bimbache once walked among these same trees, not just on the Iberian Peninsula 10,000 years ago, but possibly on Madeira itself?

This is magical realism at its essence: anchoring fantasy in geological and botanical truth, while exploring the tantalizing gaps in our historical record.

The Botanical Reality: Ocotea foetens and the Laurisilva

The Ocotea foetens, known locally as til or Stinkwood, is a genuine remnant of an ancient world. This evergreen tree belongs to the laurel family and forms the backbone of Madeira’s UNESCO-protected laurisilva forest.

The laurisilva is a Tertiary-era ecosystem, a living fossil that once covered vast stretches of Southern Europe and North Africa during the Pliocene and early Pleistocene epochs, roughly 5 million to 2 million years ago.

As ice ages advanced and retreated, climate change pushed these humid subtropical forests into extinction across most of their range. They survived only in refugia: isolated pockets where conditions remained stable. Madeira’s mountains provided exactly such a refuge, preserving what mainland Europe lost.

The Ocotea foetens itself is extraordinary. It often grows in multi-stemmed formations, what foresters call “coppice growth,” where several trunks rise from a single root system. In my chapter, I describe this as “a tree of divided unity, a body remembering the tribe that once gathered around its roots.” The botanical reality is that the tree can regenerate from its base after damage, sprouting multiple new trunks. But there’s poetry in that resilience, a suggestion of community in its very growth pattern.

The tree’s common name, Stinkwood, comes from its most distinctive feature: when cut or wounded, it releases a powerfully unpleasant odor. The wood contains aromatic oils that, while off-putting, may possess antimicrobial properties. In the chapter, Miguel encounters this as “a rank scent floods the air, a stinging, bitter reek… The Stinkwood tree cries its warning in odor.” This is fact, not fantasy. What I’ve added is the interpretation: that this stench might be the tree’s grief, its defense, and perhaps, hidden within those bitter oils, medicines we haven’t yet understood.

The Historical Reality: Who Were the Bimbache?

The Bimbache were one of the indigenous groups inhabiting the Canary Islands before Spanish conquest in the 15th century. Specifically, they lived on El Hierro, the smallest and westernmost of the islands. The term “Bimbache” itself is Spanish transliteration; we don’t know what these people called themselves. Similarly, “Guanche” (often used as a blanket term for all Canary Islands indigenous peoples) was the name for the people of Tenerife, and “Berber” is an exonym with complex colonial connotations. The people themselves may have used entirely different self-designations lost to history.

Genetic and linguistic evidence suggests these populations were related to North African Berber groups, likely arriving in the Canaries sometime between 1000 BCE and 100 CE, though dates remain contested. They brought with them cultural practices, agricultural knowledge, and spiritual traditions rooted in their North African origins.

The Intriguing Possibility: Could They Have Reached Madeira?

Here’s where history opens a tantalizing door. When the Portuguese officially “discovered” Madeira in 1419, they declared it uninhabited. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The Canary Islands lie roughly 300 miles from the African coast, while Madeira sits about 600 miles from Morocco and roughly 300 miles from the Canaries themselves.

The Bimbache and related groups were coastal peoples with maritime knowledge. While we have no definitive archaeological evidence of pre-Portuguese settlement on Madeira, the possibility cannot be dismissed. Small boats, even primitive craft, could feasibly make the journey between the Canaries and Madeira, especially with favorable currents and winds. The Canary Current flows southward along the African coast, but circular wind patterns in the Atlantic could carry small vessels northeast toward Madeira.

We know that Polynesian peoples crossed far greater expanses of the Pacific in outrigger canoes. We know that Vikings reached Iceland, Greenland, and North America. Why couldn’t North African seafarers, living on islands already requiring maritime migration, have ventured further into the Atlantic? Perhaps they came seasonally, perhaps they established temporary settlements that left no trace, or perhaps any evidence was destroyed by the Portuguese colonizers who had political reasons to declare the island “uninhabited” and therefore theirs by right of discovery.

The official history says Madeira was virgin territory. But forests remember longer than documents.

The Magical Realist “What If”: Bimbache in the Ancient Laurisilva

My chapter embraces this historical ambiguity. It imagines that the Bimbache, or their ancestors, encountered Ocotea foetens in three moments: on the Iberian Peninsula in deep antiquity when laurisilva still grew there, on the Canary Islands where pockets survived, and possibly, just possibly, on Madeira itself, where the forest reached its fullest expression.

During the early Holocene period (roughly 10,000 to 8,000 years ago), proto-Berber peoples inhabited regions where remnant laurel forests still grew. As climate changed and these forests retreated, the descendants of these peoples might have followed the trees, island by island, seeking the sacred groves their ancestors had known.

In the chapter, I write: “The Bimbache people: children of the Atlas, watched the forests with eyes tuned to silence. They said the Ocotea carried voices of ancestors across its bark, each trunk another spirit standing in the circle.” This is invention, but invention rooted in ecological memory. Many indigenous cultures develop deep spiritual connections to keystone species in their ecosystems. A people who lived among these primordial trees across multiple landscapes, who perhaps sailed to Madeira specifically because they recognized the same sacred forest their grandfathers’ grandfathers had known on the mainland, would surely see them as vessels of ancestral wisdom.

The image of pigeons eating the Ocotea berries and becoming “messengers that carried the forest’s memory into the wide blue vault of sky” is pure fantasy, but it’s inspired by the real fact that the Madeiran laurel pigeon and other endemic birds do feed on these fruits and disperse the seeds. Ecology becomes mythology; seed dispersal becomes spiritual transmission.

The King Tree: Patriarch and Symbol

The concept of a “King Tree,” an eldest specimen that serves as the forest’s patriarch, appears in many cultures. In Madeira’s Fanal forest, there are indeed ancient Ocotea specimens estimated to be 500 to 800 years old, their trunks twisted into fantastical shapes by centuries of wind and moisture. Some have become pilgrimage sites for photographers and nature lovers.

But what if there were older specimens before Portuguese logging began? What if the Bimbache, upon reaching Madeira’s misty highlands, found King Trees already ancient, already sacred, and incorporated them into their spiritual practices? We’ll never know. Those trees, if they existed, are long gone.

My chapter asks: What happens when such a tree falls? Not just ecologically (though the gap in the canopy, the changed light patterns, and the slow decomposition that feeds new growth are all real), but spiritually and emotionally? Miguel returns to find his childhood’s King Tree collapsed, and in its absence, he feels “the truth of all grandeur: to rise, to endure, and finally to fall.”

This is where magical realism serves its deepest purpose. The tree is real. Its fall is inevitable. But the grief Miguel feels, the sense that “when giants fall, nothing escapes unchanged,” this transforms botanical fact into human truth. We need our giants, our King Trees, our connections to what endures. When they fall, we fall a little too.

Where Fact Ends and Wonder Begins

The Fanal forest exists. The Ocotea foetens is real, ancient, and yes, it stinks when wounded. The Bimbache were real people, though we’ve forgotten their true names. The laurisilva once covered landscapes these peoples’ ancestors walked. And small boats could have carried them to Madeira, even if history failed to record their arrival.

Everything else, the spiritual connection, the voices in the bark, the Guardian in crimson robes, these are the “what ifs” that magical realism permits.

But they’re not arbitrary fantasies. They’re rooted in the ecological truth that humans and forests have always been intertwined, that we carry memories of landscapes even when those landscapes have vanished, and that sometimes the most ancient trees hold not just carbon and cellulose, but the witness of all who have stood beneath their branches.

When you walk in Fanal today, in the perpetual fog among those twisted giants, it doesn’t feel like fiction. It feels like the edge of something older than history, where the line between fact and myth grows as indistinct as the trees disappearing into mist. And perhaps, in that mist, you might glimpse what Miguel saw: not just trees, but the memory of peoples who walked here long before Portugal claimed discovery, peoples whose names we’ve forgotten but whose reverence for these ancient beings might still echo in the silence between the trunks.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​