Avenue of the Baobabs
Interesting facts
- About 25 more baobabs stand in the rice paddies and meadows around the avenue, and the protected site covers roughly four hectares.
- Local people spared these trees when clearing the forest because they were useful, providing food and building material.
- Grandidier's baobab stores water in its fibrous trunk, and the trunk's diameter visibly swells and shrinks with rainfall.
- Trunks can reach about three metres across, topped by a flat crown of horizontal branches.
- The white flowers open around dusk and are pollinated by fork-marked lemurs, which push their snouts in to drink nectar, and by hawk moths.
- The species flowers in the dry season, from May to August, and its fruit ripens around November and December.
- Its fruit pulp is rich in vitamin C, its seeds yield a cooking oil, and its bark fibres are twisted into rope.
- The species is classified as Endangered, mainly because its forest habitat is being turned into farmland.
- The species is named after the French explorer and naturalist Alfred Grandidier, who lived from 1836 to 1921.
- The Baobab Amoureux, the pair of intertwined trees, stand about seven kilometres northwest of the avenue.
Why it is worth it
A short stretch of road in western Madagascar holds one of the strangest and most photographed tree groups on earth. On either side of the track stand Grandidier's baobabs, Adansonia grandidieri, a species found only on the island: smooth, column-straight trunks rising to around 30 metres and ending abruptly in a small tuft of branches, as if the trees had been planted upside down. The avenue proper is only about 260 metres long, with some twenty to twenty-five giants lining the road and more scattered in the fields nearby. In Malagasy the tree is called renala, usually translated as "mother of the forest".
The name is apt, because these baobabs are survivors rather than an avenue that anyone planted. They are the last remnants of the dense dry forest that once covered the Menabe region; as the land around them was cleared for farming, the baobabs were spared, and they now stand in open, flat country with nothing to hide their silhouettes. Many of them are thought to be more than 800 years old. That isolation is what makes the place so graphic — at sunrise and especially at sunset, when the trunks glow orange and then turn to black cut-outs against the sky, the avenue looks less like a landscape than a stage set.
The trees have been protected since 2007, when the environment ministry placed the site under temporary protection, and in 2015 the avenue became a natural monument — the first in Madagascar to receive that status. A local conservation organisation has since run a visitor programme at the site. Bushfires, farming right up to the roots and water running off the fields remain the main pressures on the ageing trees. A few kilometres away, locals point out the Baobab Amoureux, two trees of another species, Adansonia za, whose trunks have twisted around each other; local tradition treats them as a pair of lovers.
Getting there
The avenue lies on national road RN8, about 11 km north of the coastal town of Morondava, between Morondava and Belon'i Tsiribihina. Morondava Airport (MOQ) is also about 11 km away. The site is reached by road from Morondava. Late afternoon, for the sunset light, is the classic time to come.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Avenue of the Baobabs, or Alley of the Baobabs, is a prominent group of Grandidier's baobabs lining the unpaved Road No.8 between Morondava and Belon'i Tsiribihina in the Menabe region of western Madagascar. Its striking landscape draws travelers from around the world, making it one of the most visited locations in the region. It has been a center of local conservation efforts, and was granted temporary protected status in July 2007 by the Ministry of Environment, Water and Forestry – a step toward making it Madagascar's first natural monument.
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