Wellington's Olive

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.