Carob tree
Ceratonia siliqua
Family · Fabaceae · Harmless
The tree of the Algarve and the Spanish Levant, with a dark dense crown and brown pods hanging all summer. Its seed is so constant in weight that jewellers used it as a standard: the carat comes from it.
Montado · Scrubland · Fields and pasture · Walls and rocks
Also known aslocust tree, St John's bread
How to tell it
A compound leaf with large, round, leathery, very glossy leaflets and no terminal leaflet. Flat, brown, leathery pods ten to twenty centimetres long. It flowers in autumn, directly on the old wood.
What it is confused with
Honey locust
Gleditsia triacanthos
Both bear long pods. Honey locust is deciduous, has huge thorns on the trunk and a leaf split into small leaflets; carob is evergreen, thornless, with large glossy leaflets.
What it is for
The ripe pod is eaten and milled into flour, used as a cocoa substitute and a food thickener. It was livestock fodder and human fallback food across the south, and remains a cash crop in the Algarve.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.