Polylepis tarapacana

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Polylepis tarapacana, photographed by Fabien Anthelme — fig. b Fabien Anthelme, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 103755637

Polylepis tarapacana, photographed by Jorge Herreros de Lartundo — fig. e Jorge Herreros de Lartundo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 84093850

Polylepis tarapacana, photographed by Aira Francisca Faúndez Fallau — fig. f Aira Francisca Faúndez Fallau, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 128543325

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 2 botanical countries

Native distribution of Polylepis tarapacana, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Bolivia	BOL	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Chile North	CLN

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Where it actually grows measured, from 88 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-7.8 °C	-4.8 °C	0.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	11.3 °C	13.1 °C	17.3 °C
Annual rainfall	368 mm	569 mm	852 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	6 mm	13 mm	17 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 88 research-grade observations of Polylepis tarapacana that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 5 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Polylepis tarapacana var. brevifilamentosa Bitter
Polylepis tarapacana var. multisquama Bitter
Polylepis tarapacana var. multisquama Bitter
Polylepis tarapacana var. pycnolopha Bitter
Polylepis tarapacana var. sajamensis Bitter

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.