Palo Santo, the Holy Wood

Palo santo is the wood of Bursera graveolens, a tree native to the seasonally dry tropical forests stretching from Mexico and Central America down through Colombia, Ecuador and Peru to the Galápagos Islands. It belongs to Burseraceae, the same resin-rich plant family as frankincense and myrrh — a distant cousin, on the other side of the world, of the trees burned along the incense route.

In Peru, where much of today’s palo santo is harvested, law permits only the collection of wood from trees that have already fallen or died of natural causes — never live ones cut down. Left to season for several years, the heartwood develops the terpene-rich fragrance the wood is prized for; freshly cut wood has almost none.

Indigenous communities across the Andes and Amazon have long burned palo santo in rituals of purification, believed to clear a space — physical or otherwise — of what no longer belongs there. In recent decades the same gesture has travelled far from its origins, into yoga studios and living rooms worldwide, sometimes stripped of the context that gave it meaning.

The IUCN lists Bursera graveolens as a species of least concern, though illegal logging persists in parts of Peru despite the regulations meant to prevent it. A stick of palo santo, then, carries two histories at once: a slow chemistry of resin and time, and a live question about who gets to harvest a sacred wood, and how.