The Cedro-do-Bucaco of the Passo de Anas

Bucaco keeps two protected cypresses within sixty metres of each other on this path, and this is the smaller one: 3.68 metres round, 27 metres tall, with a crown nineteen metres across on the state's 2016 survey. In most forests that would be the headline tree. Here it is one of several cypresses on the hillside with a file of its own. Its address is the Passo de Anas, a station on the Via Sacra named for the night Christ was taken before Annas the high priest. Barefoot Carmelite friars set these chapels out across the slope at the end of the seventeenth century and spaced them to match the distances of the walk through Jerusalem. That spacing still decides how people cross this forest. You do not go hunting for the cypress. You come round a bend expecting a shrine and find the tree standing over it. Cupressus lusitanica came from the mountains of Mexico and Guatemala, and it has been planted inside these walls in such numbers, for so long, that most Portuguese take it for a native. Nobody has dated this one and the register does not try. If you know how old it is, tell us.