Roughly 600 to 3,000 years old.
Ancient trees in Brazil
Brazil's most famous tree by international record is not its oldest. We map 15 trees in 10 cities here. The oldest of them is O Patriarca (Patriarca da Floresta) in Vassununga, at sources disagree sharply, 600 to 3,000 years.
The Cajueiro de Pirangi, a single cashew whose branches root wherever they touch the ground, has spread across roughly 8,500 square metres near Natal and held the Guinness record for the largest cashew tree since 1994, at the modest age of about 138. The genuinely old trees keep quieter company: O Patriarca, a jequitiba-rosa in the cerrado of Vassununga State Park, is called the country's oldest by a press that cannot agree whether that means 600 years or more than 3,000. Rio de Janeiro supplies the range in between, a sumauma linked to Tom Jobim, a fig tree with a disputed two centuries behind it, a baobab that arrived on ships from Africa long before anyone thought to write its age down. Four cities mapped so far, nine trees, from a single record-holding cashew to a rainforest giant nobody can date.
Every place we map in Brazil
1Rio de Janeiro6 trees · oldest 200-350 years2Fortaleza1 tree · oldest 115 years3Guaiba1 tree · oldest 300 years4Jericoacoara1 tree5Luís Correia1 tree · oldest 70 years6Maxaranguape1 tree7Nisia Floresta1 tree · oldest 150 years8Pirangi1 tree · oldest 138 years9Sao Paulo1 tree · oldest 200 years10Vassununga1 tree · oldest 600-3000 years
12 species grow in Brazil
Figs and mulberries Fig 2
Conifers Cypress 1
Southern hemisphere Kapok 1
More broadleaf trees Baobab 3 · African Mahogany 1 · Árvore-do-Imperador 1 · Button Mangrove 1 · Cashew 1 · Ficus organensis 1 · Jequitiba-rosa 1 · Strangler Fig 1 · Tamarind 1
The 9 oldest trees we map in Brazil
Roughly 250 to 350 years old.
Roughly 200 to 350 years old.
Roughly 200 to 300 years old.
Roughly 145 to 155 years old.
Roughly 140 to 160 years old.
Roughly 135 to 140 years old.
Roughly 120 to 399 years old.
Roughly 115 to 116 years old.
Trees from Brazil also appear in The Autumn Harvest · The Trees the World Has Written About · The Tallest Trees We Have Measured. See every city on the map, or open the map to find what is near you.