Prickly pear
Opuntia ficus-indica
Family · Cactaceae · Poisonous
Read this before the sheet
This plant, or one that resembles it, is dangerous. Identifying is not authorising: no app has the authority to tell you that you may eat or touch a plant.
The paddle cactus covering dry slopes all over the south and bearing the prickly pear. It came from Mexico in the sixteenth century, spread on its own and is now a declared invader. The spines that hurt are not the big ones.
Scrubland · Walls and rocks · Roadsides and waste ground · Fields and pasture
Also known asIndian fig, nopal, Barbary fig
How to tell it
Flattened blue-green pads, twenty to fifty centimetres, stacked on one another. On them, areoles with long white spines and, above all, tufts of glochids: minute, barbed, yellowish hairs that come loose at the slightest touch. Large yellow flowers on the pad edge, oval orange or reddish fruits.
What it is confused with
Sour prickly pear
Opuntia dillenii
Dillen's prickly pear has long, curved, far more numerous yellow spines and a smaller, sour fruit; the common one has few large spines and a bigger, sweet fruit. Both carry the same glochids, which are the real problem with either.
What it is for
The fruit is eaten and sold at southern markets, and young pads are a vegetable in Mexico. The problem is the glochids: they lodge by the thousand in skin and mouth, are nearly invisible and take days to work out. Picking without thick gloves and without brushing the fruit guarantees unpleasant hours, and in the eyes they cause serious injury.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.
The law says
A listed invasive alien species in Portugal and Spain. Do not plant it, do not propagate it and do not carry pads around.