King Regnans

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.