The Cedro-do-Bucaco of the Casa de Guarda do Serpa

This is the thickest cypress in Bucaco's protected collection and, on the register's own figures, much the youngest of them. Four metres seventy-two around the trunk, thirty-five metres tall, and an age recorded as about a hundred years, against the three centuries the same register gives the cypress at the Via Sacra's first-fall station, a tree only half a metre wider. Read that pairing carefully rather than as a marvel. The register does not say when the hundred years were counted, so the honest span is somewhere between ninety and a hundred and thirty, and a walled hillside laid out to make imported conifers grow fast is exactly where a cypress would put on girth quickly. It stands about two hundred metres east of the Casa de Guarda do Serpa, the keeper's house at the northern edge of the forest, on a working track rather than a pilgrim path. This is where Bucaco's classified trees run out: the last entry before the collection gives way to ordinary hillside, and the quietest of the four cypresses on this page by some distance. One more oddity worth carrying up there with you. The 2018 decree that classified the forest's other cypresses does not cover this one. It holds its place in the national register on its own paperwork, and nobody has written down why.