What is the oldest tree in Bucaco?

The Cedro de Sao Jose, a Mexican cypress planted between 1628 and 1650 by the Carmelite friars. The forest's own plaque calls it the oldest cedar in the Mata. It lost most of its height in the 2013 cyclone and stands as a broken trunk inside an iron railing.

Does it cost anything to visit?

Walking in is free. Driving in is not: the Fundacao Mata do Bucaco charges per vehicle at the gate, 5 euros for a car of up to five seats and 2 euros for a motorcycle, with no separate parking fee. Leave the car in Luso and walk up and you pay nothing.

Can you walk between these trees?

Yes. All six stand inside the walled forest within about a kilometre, starting at the Largo do Mosteiro beside the Palace Hotel and ending at the Ermida de Sao Jose. Paths are forest paths and the ground is steep in places.

Is the tallest tree in Europe here?

No, and it is worth being exact. The Giant Trees Foundation measured the Bucaco mountain ash at 64.90 metres and ranks it fourth tallest in Europe. The tallest is a karri at about 73 metres in the Mata Nacional de Vale de Canas near Coimbra, half an hour away.

Portugal

Ancient Trees in Bucaco

Bucaco is a forest behind a wall, and the wall is the reason it exists. Discalced Carmelite friars enclosed this hillside in 1628 and got two popes to protect it in writing, one bull threatening excommunication for anyone who damaged a tree. Four centuries of that produced 105 hectares holding more than 250 species, including the cypress that Philip Miller named after Portugal from specimens he saw here. The six trees on this page stand within about a kilometre of each other, and one of them named a species.

Wellington's Olive

Olive (Olea europaea) · unknown, but standing here in 1810 · Largo do Mosteiro

On the night of 27 September 1810 the Duke of Wellington tied his horse to this tree, and the tree is still there while most of the convent is not. Wellington had just fought Massena's French army along the ridge above, in the battle that stopped the third invasion of Portugal, and he quartered himself in the Carmelite convent of Santa Cruz afterwards. Nineteenth century builders demolished most of that convent to raise the Palace Hotel, and the olive survived the demolition by standing in the way: it now sits in the middle of the road across the Largo do Mosteiro, which is exactly where a tree ends up when nobody can quite bring themselves to cut it. It is a modest thing to look at, seven and a half metres tall with a trunk two and a half metres round, and it earns its place on what happened beside it rather than on size. Two centuries of tourists have been shown this tree. The state classified it in 2018 along with the rest of the forest's veterans, and it is the only one of them a general is supposed to have used as a hitching post.

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The Bunya Pine by the Palace Hotel

Bunya Pine (Araucaria bidwillii) · about 160 years · Palace Hotel gardens

Do not stand under this one in a bad year. The bunya pine makes the heaviest cone of any conifer on earth, up to ten kilograms, roughly a bowling ball, and it drops them from a crown twenty-eight metres up. In its native southeast Queensland the trees fruit heavily every three years or so, and Aboriginal groups travelled hundreds of kilometres for the bunya gatherings that followed, feasting on the nuts inside. Australia now signs and fences these trees in public parks for the obvious reason. This one is five metres round the trunk and has been growing beside the Palace Hotel for about a century and a half, which means it went in while the hotel was still a Carmelite convent and was already substantial when the neo-Manueline palace rose next to it between 1888 and 1905. Araucarias are living fossils, a family that was spread across the southern supercontinent before the continents separated, and the stiff geometric spirals of their leaves look older than everything around them because they are. It is the strangest silhouette in a forest full of imports.

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The Blue Gum on the Hotel Road

Tasmanian Blue Gum (Eucalyptus globulus) · about 150 years · Viveiro florestal

Seven metres and fifteen centimetres around the trunk, which is more than any other tree on this page and more than most trees in Portugal. This blue gum sits on the access road to the Palace Hotel near the old forest nursery, forty-five metres tall with a crown thirty-two metres across, and it was classified for what the state politely calls great ornamental and landscape value, meaning somebody looked at it and could not walk past. Eucalyptus globulus is the tree Portugal has an argument about. It arrived from Tasmania in the middle of the nineteenth century, it grows faster than anything native, and it now covers around a quarter of the country's forest area feeding the pulp mills, which is why it is blamed for fires and for draining water tables. That national row makes a specimen like this one easy to overlook. Judge it as an individual instead: a century and a half old, a trunk you cannot get your arms a third of the way around, and bark that peels off in long ribbons to leave a smooth grey and cream column. The leaves smell of eucalyptus oil when you crush a fallen one, and the young growth on a blue gum is a different shape and a different colour from the adult leaves above it.

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King Regnans

Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) · about 145 years · Vale de Sao Silvestre

This is the tallest tree in the forest and, on the best measurement anyone has taken, the fourth tallest in Europe. The Giant Trees Foundation put a laser on it and got 64.90 metres, with a trunk eight and a half metres around. The national register, working from an older estimate, says 72.9 metres. That gap is worth stating rather than smoothing over, and the honest version is that it stands somewhere between about 65 and 73 metres, which either way is roughly a twenty-storey building growing out of a Portuguese hillside. It went in around 1880. Eucalyptus regnans is the tallest flowering plant on earth: the record holder, a Tasmanian called Centurion, reaches 100 metres, and nineteenth century Australian foresters claimed felled specimens well beyond that. Portugal is not Tasmania, so a tree of this size here is a century and a half of unusually kind conditions in a sheltered valley. It is also the reason the name King Regnans stuck. Look for it on the bend of the forest road at the head of the valley, and give up trying to photograph the whole of it, because nobody manages that either.

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The Redwoods of Santo Elias

Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · about 147 years · Ermida de Santo Elias

Two coast redwoods stand in front of a hermitage, about ten metres apart, forty-five metres tall, and roughly eight thousand kilometres from the only place on earth they grow wild. Sequoia sempervirens is native to a strip of fog belt along the coast of northern California and southern Oregon, no more than about fifty kilometres wide, and it is the tallest tree species in the world. The reason it does well at Bucaco is the same reason it does well there: this hillside catches sea mist off the Atlantic, and a redwood drinks through its leaves, taking a substantial share of its water directly out of fog rather than up from the roots. The friars did not plant these. They arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the forest had passed to the state and a fashion for collecting the world's conifers was at its peak, and they are among the earlier redwoods in Europe. Their trunks are about five and a half metres round, wrapped in bark that can grow a foot thick, soft and fibrous, fire resistant, and almost impossible to set alight. The two are near twins and the register separates them only by three centimetres of girth, so stand between them and you have seen both.

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Photo: Soniapampa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Cedro de Sao Jose

Mexican Cypress (Cupressus lusitanica) · about 380 years · Ermida de Sao Jose

This tree is the reason a Mexican cypress is named after Portugal. When Philip Miller described the species in 1768 he was working from specimens growing at Bucaco, so he called it Cupressus lusitanica, and the Portuguese returned the compliment by calling it cedro-do-bucaco. Both names are wrong twice over. It is a cypress and not a cedar, and it comes from the mountains of Mexico and Central America, carried back by the Carmelite friars who enclosed this hillside in 1628. The plaque at its foot says it was planted between 1628 and 1650, which makes it about 380 years old and the oldest tree in the forest. It no longer looks the part, and you should know that before you walk down. Cyclone Gong hit Bucaco in January 2013, destroyed roughly 40 percent of the forest and took the top off this one: it stood 32.9 metres before the storm and was measured at 14 metres after. What is left is a trunk five and a half metres round, split and silvered, held inside an ornate iron railing, with green still coming out of the wreckage above. Two popes once threatened excommunication for damaging a tree here. This one took its damage from the weather.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Bucaco?: The Cedro de Sao Jose, a Mexican cypress planted between 1628 and 1650 by the Carmelite friars. The forest's own plaque calls it the oldest cedar in the Mata. It lost most of its height in the 2013 cyclone and stands as a broken trunk inside an iron railing.
Does it cost anything to visit?: Walking in is free. Driving in is not: the Fundacao Mata do Bucaco charges per vehicle at the gate, 5 euros for a car of up to five seats and 2 euros for a motorcycle, with no separate parking fee. Leave the car in Luso and walk up and you pay nothing.
Can you walk between these trees?: Yes. All six stand inside the walled forest within about a kilometre, starting at the Largo do Mosteiro beside the Palace Hotel and ending at the Ermida de Sao Jose. Paths are forest paths and the ground is steep in places.
Is the tallest tree in Europe here?: No, and it is worth being exact. The Giant Trees Foundation measured the Bucaco mountain ash at 64.90 metres and ranks it fourth tallest in Europe. The tallest is a karri at about 73 metres in the Mata Nacional de Vale de Canas near Coimbra, half an hour away.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Bucaco? The full answer, with map and directions.
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Walk all 6 trees about 1.1 km, 15 min on foot