What is the oldest tree in Bucaco?
The oldest tree in the Mata Nacional do Bucaco is the Cedro de Sao Jose, a Mexican cypress standing in the forecourt of the Ermida de Sao Jose. The forest's own plaque at its foot says it was planted between 1628 and 1650, which makes it roughly 380 years old and the oldest cedar in the forest. It is not really a cedar, and it is not Portuguese: Cupressus lusitanica comes from Mexico and Central America.
The friars arrived in 1628 and this tree went into the ground within their first two decades, which makes it one of the first exotic trees planted at Bucaco and probably one of the first of its species in Europe. The species carries the mistake in its name. When Philip Miller described it in 1768 he was looking at specimens growing here, so he called a Mexican cypress lusitanica, after Portugal, and the Portuguese call it cedro-do-bucaco after a forest it never came from. The tree is not what it was. Cyclone Gong tore through Bucaco in January 2013, felled ten notable trees and wrecked around 40 percent of the forest, and it took most of this one's height with it: the register measured 32.9 metres before, and 14 metres after. What stands now is a five and a half metre trunk inside an iron railing, broken at the top, still carrying green. Go expecting a survivor rather than a spire.
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