How to Identify Louro Preto

Start with color and weight together. Louro Preto is a warm, medium-brown wood — light tan to golden with darker brown streaking that gives it a soft, walnut-like character — and it feels moderate in the hand, neither light and punky like the pale utility 'louros' nor dense enough to sink like ipê or ebony. If a board reads honey-brown to tobacco with subtle darker striping and hefts about like true walnut, Cordia goeldiana is a strong candidate. The sapwood is distinctly paler, yellowish to greyish, and usually well marked off from the heartwood.

Read the grain and figure. The grain is typically straight but may run slightly irregular or wavy, producing a mild stripe or ribbon on quartered faces rather than any bold figure; the texture is medium and fairly even, with a low-to-moderate luster. It does not show the fine, glassy density of a heavy tropical, nor the bland featurelessness of the soft pale louros.

Check the end grain. Cordia goeldiana is diffuse-porous, with medium-sized pores of moderate frequency, often carrying pale tyloses or deposits, and typically some lighter parenchyma banding visible with a lens. The pores are visible but not coarse. Freshly cut, the wood has only a faint, nondescript odor — unlike some aromatic true 'louros' of the laurel family, which carry a spicy or bay-leaf scent; that absence of strong aroma is itself a useful clue that you are looking at the Cordia rather than a laurel 'louro.'

The most likely confusions fall into two groups. First, the many other Amazonian woods sold as 'louro' — most of which are laurel-family species that are paler, softer, blander, and frequently aromatic; Louro Preto is browner, streakier, denser, and non-aromatic. Second, true walnut (Juglans), which Louro Preto is deliberately marketed to resemble: walnut usually runs a cooler, more chocolate to purplish-brown, often with more pronounced figure, whereas Louro Preto tends warmer and more golden with tan-to-brown streaking. African mahogany and sapele can also be confused on color, but those show a redder cast and, in sapele's case, a much more regular ribbon stripe.