The Avenue of the Baobabs is the last stand of a forest that has otherwise vanished. Along a 260-metre dirt track in western Madagascar, between Morondava and Belon'i Tsiribihina, around 25 Grandidier's baobabs rise in a loose colonnade, their smooth grey trunks up to three metres thick and their crowns lifting 30 metres overhead. Some are reckoned to be more than 800 years old. They did not grow as an avenue — they are survivors. Centuries ago a dense dry forest covered this land, and as farmers cleared it for rice and pasture they left the baobabs standing, too useful and too sacred to fell. The species grows nowhere on Earth but Madagascar, and it is now endangered, with few young trees rising to replace the old ones. Malagasy call these giants renala, 'mother of the forest,' and treat them as homes of ancestral spirits.
The road runs north to south, so the light works the trees through the day: coppery at dawn, hard black silhouettes at noon, and deep red at sunset, when their shadows stretch across the dirt and villagers pass with zebu carts on the way home. This ordinary scene has become Madagascar's defining natural image. The baobabs flower only in the dark — large white blooms open at dusk and are pollinated overnight by fork-marked lemurs and hawkmoths. In the rainy months the surrounding rice paddies flood and glow green, and the trunks stand doubled in the still water. After decades with almost no safeguards, the grove was given temporary reserve status in 2007 and formally named a Natural Monument in 2015, and a local NGO now runs the small ecotourism around it — though bushfires, erosion and runoff from the paddies still press in from every side.