“Nomevés”, “you don’t see me”, the Andalusian plant that was thought to have disappeared reappears
Described by the scientific community in the early 1980s, this living fossil had not been seen in Andalusia for decades. In April, biologists found it again. But the small number of individuals spotted and its ephemeral flowering mean that this plant remains classified as “critically endangered.”
The nomevés, considered a jewel of the Iberian botanical world, was thought to have disappeared from Andalusia for more than forty years. However, this living fossil, more than twenty-five million years old, has just been rediscovered in the Sierra Norte in the province of Seville . The species, bearing the scientific name Gyrocaryum oppositifolium Valdés, was identified in 1982 in the Seville mountains, then located on hillsides in Ponferrada (province of León) and Cadalso de los Vidrios (province of Madrid). It remains classified as “critically endangered” [in the sense of the International Union for Conservation of Nature] due to the small number of individuals and their ephemeral flowering.
“As soon as I saw it, I knew it was the one,” biologist Rosario Velasco passionately recounts. “ Since 2001, I have been looking for it every year, at first with great hope. But in recent years, I have begun to believe the species was lost. The first time, I came across ten specimens, then, during other explorations, around a hundred.” It was she who, after twenty-four years of futile efforts, found the nomevés on April 1 , in the same massif where, in the 1980s, it had been discovered and immediately presented to the scientific community.
It exists in tr
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