Olmos Centenarios de la Ermita de Belen

Dutch elm disease took most of Spain's elms through the twentieth century. Seven of them, growing together in the courtyard of a pilgrimage sanctuary in rural Extremadura, did not go. The Olmos Centenarios stand in the grounds of the Santuario de Nuestra Senora de Belen, 11 kilometres out of Cabeza del Buey on the road toward Almorchon. Wikipedia and the municipal site both describe this grove as one of the few living stands of elms left in Spain to have survived the disease that wiped out the rest. It was not a clean survival: some of the trunks are hollowed by past infection, and the grove has since been cordoned off and propped up to keep it standing. The sanctuary itself has hosted an annual pilgrimage every 27 September since at least the 1600s, so these trees have stood through centuries of the same gathering under their canopy. In 2017 Spain named them its Tree of the Year, and the following year they placed second in the European contest with 22,323 votes. One of the seven has a published height of 14 metres. An interpretive panel at the site itself puts the trunk at 7 metres round and gives the age as over 150 years, unknown beyond that, matching the tradition every other source repeats. The grounds sit beside the public EX-104 road with no gate or charge mentioned in any source.