What is the oldest tree in Antwerp?

Most likely a copper beech before the Sint-Willibrorduskerk in Berchem, planted as a liberty tree marking either 1789 or Belgian independence in 1830. Either date makes it at least two centuries old.

Are Antwerp's remarkable trees free to visit?

Nine of the ten are free, standing in public parks, a churchyard square and a city street. The exception is the historic tree cover at Zoo Antwerpen, which requires a paid zoo ticket.

Why does this list include a tree planted in 1994?

The linden on the Grote Markt was planted to mark the 50th anniversary of Antwerp's liberation from German occupation. It is included for what it commemorates, a single dated act of remembrance in the city's most visited square, not for its age.

Why are so few of Antwerp's remarkable trees given a precise age?

Compared with cities that run a dedicated historic tree register, Antwerp's protections come from a general heritage inventory that records circumference, species rarity and champion status more often than planting dates, so most ages here are honest estimates rather than documented figures.

Belgium

Ancient Trees in Antwerp

Antwerp's remarkable trees rarely claim extreme age the way a churchyard yew or a castle oak might elsewhere. What the city has instead is precision about smaller things: national champion girths for unglamorous species, a liberty tree nobody can date to a single revolution, a zoo whose landscaping survived two world wars fought in the same city block, and a park quietly losing the very trees that once defined it. Merchant families built garden districts outside the old city walls from the 1500s onward, and several of today's ten still grow inside what were once their private pleasure grounds.

The Copper Beech of Sint-Willibrorduskerk

Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea) · 196-237 years · Berchem

Nobody can say for certain which revolution this tree commemorates, only that it commemorates one. Standing 21 metres tall with a trunk 4.95 metres around, this copper beech dominates the small square between a rectory and the Sint-Willibrorduskerk in Berchem, and its size and position both point to it having been planted as a vrijheidsboom, a liberty tree, the European tradition of marking a political upheaval by putting a tree in the ground rather than raising a statue. The candidates are 1789, the year the Brabant Revolution briefly threw off Austrian rule, or 1830, the year Belgium itself declared independence, and heritage assessors who protected the tree as a monument in 1949 could not settle on which. It most likely began life inside the rectory's enclosed garden, sheltered there long enough to build the girth and canopy spread, some 32 metres across, that it shows today, before the garden wall came down and left it standing in the open square people see now. Whichever revolution it marks, it has now outlived both the political order it may have celebrated and the one that replaced it.

Read more and get directions →

The Summer Linden of Rivierenhof

Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · unknown, protected since 2010 · Deurne · at its best now

A single linden tree earned government protection in 2010 not for its species, which is common, but for exactly where it stands: in front of Sterckshof castle, at the heart of a park whose ownership reads like a highlight reel of Antwerp history. Hof Ter Rivieren began as a modest farm in the 15th century, became the country retreat of a wealthy Antwerp merchant in the 16th, and was bought by the Jesuits in 1618 as a rural escape from the city. The linden, a summer lime rather than the more common small-leaved variety, now anchors a 30 metre protected zone around its own base, a rare individual tree designation from Flanders' heritage agency rather than a blanket park listing. Its size alone does the talking: a broad, high crown visible across the meadow it stands in, opposite the entrance to the Sterckshof manor house, forming what heritage assessors call a visual unity with the protected building beside it. The Rivierenhof became a public park a century ago, one of the largest green spaces in the Antwerp region today, and this tree predates that public opening by centuries, a private estate's ornament turned into a landmark anyone can walk up to for free.

Read more and get directions →

The Black Locust of Hertoghepark

Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · unknown, national champion · Zuid

The thickest black locust tree recorded anywhere in Belgium grows in a small city park hemmed in by three Antwerp streets. At 4.10 metres around, measured in 2009, this robinia holds the species' national girth record in the country's own dendrological inventory, an unglamorous but real distinction for a tree species better known for lining railway embankments than for record breaking size. Hertoghepark is a fragment of the Leikwartier, a garden district laid out from 1547 by the property speculator Gilbert Van Schoonbeke on land he bought from the Van de Werve family, meant as leafy weekend retreats for Antwerp's wealthy merchant class outside the city walls. The Hertoghe and Belpaire family gardens and the old Mertens farm were later folded together into the single park that survives today, protected since 1974 as a historic cultural landscape. Black locust is not a long lived species by tree standards, rarely making it past a century and a half in good health, so this specimen's champion status says less about extreme age and more about how much room and light it found in a private garden turned public park, growing largely undisturbed while the city grew dense around it.

Read more and get directions →

The Black Mulberry of Hertoghepark

Black Mulberry (Morus nigra) · unknown, national champion · Zuid

Sharing Hertoghepark with Belgium's thickest black locust is a much smaller record holder: a black mulberry measured at 1.28 metres around in 1989, listed as the national champion of its species regardless of that modest girth. Mulberries simply do not grow thick trunks the way oaks or planes do, so a champion mulberry looks unremarkable standing next to almost anything else in the same park, its record coming from being the best example available rather than from raw size. The species has a long history in gardens like this one: black mulberry was planted across Europe for centuries wherever someone hoped, usually in vain in this climate, to raise silkworms, and even where the silk trade never took off the trees stayed for their fruit, staining hands and pavement a deep purple black every late summer. This one has stood through the same garden district history as its more imposing neighbour, part of the Leikwartier laid out from 1547 and consolidated into today's protected city park in 1974. Its precise planting date is not recorded, only that it has held its national champion title since at least the 1989 measurement that put it on record.

Read more and get directions →

The Cut-Leaved Horse Chestnut of Middelheim

Cut-Leaved Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum 'Laciniata') · unknown, mature · Middelheim

Most of Middelheim's fame comes from the sculptures scattered across its lawns, but one of its most unusual residents is a tree: a cut leaved white horse chestnut, a genetic curiosity in which every leaflet emerges narrow and deeply serrated instead of the broad fan shape that makes ordinary horse chestnuts so recognisable. Measured at 1.35 metres around in 2016, it is a rare enough variant that Middelheim's own dendrological collection, built up alongside the open air sculpture museum that gives the park its international reputation, treats it as one of the grounds' notable specimens in its own right. The wider Middelheim estate combines with neighbouring Den Brandt and Vogelenzang to form the Nachtegalenpark, merged into one public green space in 1911 after the city bought up what had been a string of private pleasure estates dating back to the 13th and 14th centuries. Sculptures by artists from Rodin to contemporary names now stand under a tree canopy considerably older than the museum around them, and this misshapen horse chestnut, planted for its oddity rather than its beauty, has outlasted several generations of visitors who came only for the art.

Read more and get directions →

The Canadian Poplar of Eric Sasselaan

Canadian Poplar (Populus x canadensis) · unknown, fast-grown · Kiel / Nieuw Zuid

At 35 metres, this Canadian poplar is among the tallest trees recorded anywhere in Antwerp, its trunk clear of branches for a full 6 metres before the crown even begins, a shape that comes from growing hard and fast for light rather than from any deliberate pruning. Measured at 5.40 metres around in 2011, it stands beside a bridge on Eric Sasselaan, an ordinary stretch of the city with nothing else to recommend it as a destination, which is exactly the point: this is not a castle park or a botanic garden specimen but a street tree that simply grew bigger and faster than anyone expected a hybrid poplar to. Canadian poplar is a fast growing hybrid, not a long lived species by any measure, typically reaching its full size within decades rather than centuries, which makes its scale here more a demonstration of what the species can do under good conditions than a claim to great age. It is a reminder that not every remarkable tree in a city has a noble family or a monastery behind it. Some are simply the biggest thing of their kind that a stretch of unremarkable pavement happened to grow.

Read more and get directions →

The Peace Tree of the Grote MarktYoungest tree

Common Lime (Tilia x europaea) · under 35 years · Historic Centre

The youngest tree on this list stands in the middle of the oldest square. On 3 September 1994, the city planted a small linden on the Grote Markt, ringed by the Renaissance guildhalls and the Gothic town hall that make this square one of the most photographed in Belgium, to mark exactly fifty years since Antwerp's liberation from German occupation in 1944. A bronze plaque set into four chained posts around its base spells out the anniversary in plain terms: Vrijheidsboom, 50th anniversary of the liberation of Antwerp. Unlike everything else on this list, there is nothing uncertain about this tree's age or its meaning, no disputed circumference, no folklore standing in for a missing record. It is barely three decades old, a sapling by the standard of a churchyard beech or a castle park oak, and it will not be the oldest or the largest tree in Antwerp for a very long time yet. What it offers instead is the opposite of ambiguity: a single, dated, deliberately public act of remembrance, growing in the one square in the city that every visitor already walks through.

Read more and get directions →

The Park Trees of Den Brandt

Mixed species (English landscape park) · undated, old growth · Middelheim

Behind a castle built in 1790 that itself replaced a medieval structure destroyed centuries earlier, Den Brandt's park holds a valuable, largely uncatalogued collection of solitary trees and tree groups around an artificial pond and open lawn, laid out in the English landscape style once fashionable among Antwerp's merchant elite. The estate is first documented in 1396, when it was likely a farmstead rather than the country residence it later became, and it stayed in private hands for centuries, passing to the della Faille de Waerloos family in 1804 and then to the Kreglinger family in 1910, who bought both the castle and 16 hectares of grounds around it. The public only gained access in 1911, and today Den Brandt forms one third of the combined Nachtegalenpark alongside Middelheim and Vogelenzang. No single tree here carries a published age or circumference record in the sources checked for this entry, so none is claimed. What survives is a planting scheme old enough that Flanders' heritage inventory rates the tree population itself as valuable, an English style landscape garden whose individual specimens have simply never been measured for public record the way the specimens at nearby Hertoghepark or Rivierenhof have.

Read more and get directions →

The Historic Grounds of Zoo Antwerpen

Mixed species (historic zoo landscape) · undated, planted from 1843 · Antwerpen-Centraal

Belgium's oldest zoo has spent more of its history rebuilding than expanding. Zoo Antwerpen opened on 21 July 1843, right beside what would become the city's Centraal Station, and its site and tree cover were repeatedly caught in the crossfire of a location that made strategic sense for a railway hub and none at all for a garden: German bombardment damaged the zoo badly in August 1914, and the Second World War hit it even harder, destroying the aquarium, reptile house, bird house, hippo house and winter garden in a single conflict. That the zoo's landscaped grounds, laid out and steadily replanted under head gardener Florent Blockx from around 1935 onward, survived both wars intact enough to be protected as a landscape in 1975 and recognised as a full historical monument in 1984, says as much about the tree cover's resilience as about the animals it shelters. A dedicated irrigation system installed in 1982 keeps the older plantings alive through Belgian summers. No single tree here is singled out in the historical record, so this entry stands for the grounds as a whole, a rare case of a European zoo's landscaping surviving through two world wars fought in the same city block.

Read more and get directions →

The Millennium Ginkgo of the Stadspark

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · about 26 years · Zuid / Centrum

Antwerp's first public park has spent the last forty years quietly losing the very trees that made it worth designating in the first place. When the German landscape architect Eduard Keilig laid out the Stadspark in 1869 on the site of the city's demilitarised Spanish fortifications, he built it around mature tree cover that came with the land, a striking contrast of an irregular pond, an island reached by a suspension bridge and a steep grassy slope. Surveys by Belgium's own dendrological association in 1986 and 2005 both flagged the same problem: a historically significant tree population under real pressure from disease, storm damage and basic safety concerns, with large sections already removed by the time of the second survey. Rather than pretend nothing had changed, the city marked the turn of the millennium in the winter of 1999 to 2000 by planting a ginkgo, a species famous for outliving almost everything around it, as a deliberate long view gesture in a park whose 19th century originals were already disappearing. What remains is a park honest about its own losses, old fortification earthworks reshaped into a pond and hillside nearly forty years before Belgium's dendrologists started counting what the storms had taken.

Read more and get directions →

Going there? Download all 10 trees as a map file and open it in Google Maps, Organic Maps or any hiking app. Works offline, no app needed.

Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Antwerp?: Most likely a copper beech before the Sint-Willibrorduskerk in Berchem, planted as a liberty tree marking either 1789 or Belgian independence in 1830. Either date makes it at least two centuries old.
Are Antwerp's remarkable trees free to visit?: Nine of the ten are free, standing in public parks, a churchyard square and a city street. The exception is the historic tree cover at Zoo Antwerpen, which requires a paid zoo ticket.
Why does this list include a tree planted in 1994?: The linden on the Grote Markt was planted to mark the 50th anniversary of Antwerp's liberation from German occupation. It is included for what it commemorates, a single dated act of remembrance in the city's most visited square, not for its age.
Why are so few of Antwerp's remarkable trees given a precise age?: Compared with cities that run a dedicated historic tree register, Antwerp's protections come from a general heritage inventory that records circumference, species rarity and champion status more often than planting dates, so most ages here are honest estimates rather than documented figures.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Antwerp? The full answer, with map and directions.
More like this: Several of these trees also appear in Europe's 10 Most Remarkable Ancient Trees.
More cities: Ancient trees in Amsterdam · Ancient trees in Lisbon · Ancient trees in London · Ancient trees in Paris · Ancient trees in Rome · Ancient trees in Tokyo · Ancient trees in Istanbul · Ancient trees in Barcelona · Ancient trees in Kyoto · Ancient trees in Madrid · Ancient trees in New York · Ancient trees in Dublin · Ancient trees in Edinburgh · Ancient trees in Brussels

Know a tree that belongs on this list? Send it in. Suggestions feed curation; the list itself stays editorial.

Walk 6 of these trees about 5.7 km, 1h 16m on foot