Century plant
Agave americana
Family · Asparagaceae · 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.
Emergency
The giant rosette of blue spiny leaves that dominates cliffs, road banks and southern dunes. It lives ten to thirty years without flowering, throws up an eight-metre candelabra stalk in one go, and dies.
Dunes and sand · Roadsides and waste ground · Walls and rocks · Scrubland
Also known asAmerican aloe, maguey
How to tell it
A rosette of fleshy leaves one to two metres long, blue-grey, with curved teeth along the margin and a hard dark spine at the tip. The flowering stalk, when present, is unmistakable: eight metres, branched like a candelabra.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
In Mexico it gives fibre and spirits. Here it has no use and is a problem: besides being invasive, the sap is strongly irritant and causes blistering, burning dermatitis, and the leaf-tip spine is hard enough to go through clothing and injure eyes. Cutting leaves without goggles and gloves is a bad idea.
The law says
An invasive alien species in Portugal, with serious impact on cliffs and dune systems. Do not plant or propagate it.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
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Nothing appears here without a person reading it first. Contributions do not replace the entry or its warnings: until a botanist confirms, what is written above stands.