The Cork Oak of Santa Tecla

The parish spent about six years asking before this cork oak was protected. When the classification came through they marked it on 21 March 2012, World Forest Day, with fourth-year pupils from the primary school up the road, who were handed the job of guarding it. The national register gives the trunk 3.5 metres round, the tree 15 metres tall, and the crown 21 metres across, which is wider than the tree is high. That shape is the point of it. Largo de Santa Tecla is a square people actually use, and what a crown like that produces on a Minho summer afternoon is shade. The register dated the tree to 150 years at the 2011 measurement, so about 165 now. Quercus suber is the tree the cork industry is built on, and Portugal produces more cork than any other country. The bark is the reason: thick, spongy, fire-resistant, and it grows back after stripping, which almost no other tree manages. A cork oak standing in a public square is generally left unharvested and keeps that bark, deeply furrowed and pale, a surface that looks several sizes too big for the trunk underneath. Three oaks classified in the same act stand about sixty metres away, so the whole stop takes a minute.