What is the oldest tree in Buenos Aires?
Buenos Aires's own Arbopedia register names the Gomero de la Recoleta as the city's oldest tree, a wide fig standing a few metres from the gate of the Recoleta Cemetery and estimated at roughly 250 to 300 years old. Nobody agrees on how it got there: one account has Recoleto friars planting it around 1718, another credits the agronomist Martin Jose de Altolaguirre's exotic orchard of around 1781, and either date puts it in the ground before Argentina existed as a country. Even its species is disputed. The city calls it a Moreton Bay fig, Wikidata files the same tree as a rubber tree, and this page has flagged the disagreement rather than settled it. What is not disputed is the branch: one limb reaches thirty metres from the trunk, propped since 2014 by a car-parts sculpture of Atlas that appears to take its weight. If you can date the tree more precisely, or settle which species it actually is, tell us.
Every tree on this page comes from ordinary web research rather than a single register, because Buenos Aires publishes its notable trees one page at a time on the city government's own Arbopedia site instead of as a downloadable dataset. The four trees here were found and checked one by one, through the city's own pages, national government pages, and local press, rather than pulled from one authoritative list. Two disagreements run through the set. The Gomero's species and planting story both split across sources, and this page carries both readings rather than picking a winner. The Protomedicato magnolias carry a second kind of disagreement: the city's own register text says they were planted in the late nineteenth century, while the same page and every other source calls them more than two hundred years old, a gap that reads like a typo between two centuries rather than a real dispute. Only one tree here, the magnolia planted by President Avellaneda in 1875, carries a documented planting date rather than an estimate. Location pins are street-level or plaza-level throughout, and one entry, the Protomedicato pair, stands on working school grounds and is marked as visible from the street rather than approachable.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.