ArborNote’s Tree of the Week was chosen by our fearless leader, Hank Ortiz! He has chosen the Cantabrian Mountain Oak (Quercus orocantabrica) because he has recently been reading about historical ship building. The oak forests of Spain’s Cantabrian Mountains helped supply the timber for the great Spanish shipbuilding industry of the 16th century for the Spanish Armada. The strong, naturally curved trunks and branches of northern Spanish oaks were particularly valuable for the massive structural timbers of wooden warships. One of the oaks growing in those same forests was the Cantabrian oak, Quercus orocantabrica.  By the 1500s, the connection between these northern forests and shipbuilding was important enough that the Spanish Crown regulated and protected oak resources for naval use. But there’s an intriguing historical twist: no 16th-century shipbuilder would have known it by that name. The species wasn’t formally recognized by science until more than 400 years after the Armada sailed!