The Guardian of Cibin (Paznicul Cibinului)

It takes eight men with their arms outstretched to get round this fir, according to a Sibiu newspaper, and at about 42 metres it is taller than a twelve-storey building. The Guardian of Cibin stands deep in the Cibin gorge in Romania's Southern Carpathians, some twelve kilometres up a forest road from the village of Gura Raului. Its name comes from a shepherd's legend. Caught in a storm, a shepherd sheltered his flock under the fir, and when the storm passed the sheep were gone. He wept and prayed, the tree grew until it was tall enough, and he climbed it and saw his flock grazing in a distant meadow. Since then it has been the watchman of the gorge. Every source puts it at about 500 years old. Local lore says it came up in the time of Mihai Viteazul, Michael the Brave, who briefly united the Romanian lands around 1600; the story fits the figure, though nobody has counted the rings. The trunk is about two metres across at its widest, which works out to roughly six metres round; that girth is our arithmetic from the diameter, not a tape measurement. It is very much alive: two Sibiu papers wrote in September 2024 about the tourists it still draws. A marked trail and safety railings lead to it through public forest managed by the Gura Raului forestry district. The pin is approximate, so follow the trail rather than the dot.