A tree does not usually get a verdict from a university, but this one did. In 2011 the University of Coimbra's Centre for Functional Ecology dated the Carvalho de Calvos at over 500 years old, and reported it the oldest Pedunculate Oak anywhere on the Iberian Peninsula. The municipality had already built a visitor centre around it six years earlier, in 2005, betting on a tree everybody locally already believed was ancient. The trunk explains the bet. It widens at ground level into what locals describe as a crater, a mass of buttressed wood that two official sources measure differently depending on where they wrap the tape: 10 metres round at breast height, or 11.5 metres at the base. Both figures come from the tree's own public-interest registration rather than a guess, and the difference is a matter of where the trunk was measured rather than a disagreement about the tree. That hollow, crater-like base now shelters the stag beetle, a species protected under Portuguese law. Designated a tree of public interest on 22 August 1997, it has survived disease, fire and old amputated branches, and gone on to place as a national Tree of the Year finalist twice, in 2019 and 2025. Marked trails now run around it, inside the interpretation centre built for exactly this purpose.
Rua do Carvalho, within the Centro de Interpretacao do Carvalho de Calvos, Calvos e Frades, Povoa de Lanhoso, Braga You can recognise it by the crater-like buttressed base, 11.5 metres round, inside its own dedicated visitor centre. It stands on Rua do Carvalho, Calvos, Povoa de Lanhoso.
Free public interpretation centre grounds (Centro de Interpretacao do Carvalho de Calvos), open Monday to Friday 09:00 to 18:00 and Saturday 09:00 to 13:00; no admission fee stated by any source found, but visiting is tied to the centre's hours rather than around the clock.
About 3km from Povoa de Lanhoso town centre, in Calvos parish; no public transport stop confirmed at the site, likely reached by car.