Coimbra keeps its oldest trees the way it keeps its university, on the record. A forest three kilometres from the centre holds the tallest tree in Europe, a Western Australian karri planted around 1873, with a bunya pine from the same continent shading the same path. Inside the botanical garden, entered through the arches of a Roman aqueduct, a second bunya has spent a century and a half growing wider rather than taller. A camphor tree on a college campus, planted in 1860, made Portugal's ten finalists for Tree of the Year 2026.
0 of 4 visited in Coimbra
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The Bunya Pine of the Arcos do Jardim
Bunya Pine (Araucaria bidwillii) · around 165 years · Almedina, within the University Botanical Garden
The University of Coimbra's botanical garden grows seven different species of araucaria. This is the one that stops people on the path. A bunya pine from southeast Queensland, it has a trunk 6.3 metres round and a crown 16.6 metres across, carried on only 19 metres of height: a tree built outward rather than upward.
Its address is half the story. You reach it through the Arcos do Jardim, the arches of the Sao Sebastiao aqueduct, then climb to the upper terrace where the garden keeps its oldest exotics. That collection dates to the nineteenth century and it is not a modest one: thirty species of eucalyptus, seven araucarias, and a Moreton Bay fig that Thomas Pakenham thought worth putting in Remarkable Trees of the World. A Portuguese newspaper surveying the garden's treasures in 2018 described this terrace plainly as the part where the big trees are, some of them a century and a half old.
Portugal's register of trees of public interest classified the bunya in December 2010 and recorded its age as 150 years at that measurement, which puts it around 165 now. The species is Australian and this tree has never seen its own continent. Everything else about the setting, from the aqueduct arches to the terrace walls, is Coimbra.
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2
The Karri Knight
Karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor) · roughly 145 to 150 years · Torres do Mondego
The tallest tree in Europe is an Australian, and it grows in a small forest a quarter of an hour's walk from a car park outside Coimbra. Eucalyptus diversicolor, the karri, comes from the far southwest corner of Western Australia. This one has reached somewhere between 73 and 75 metres, depending on who measured it and when. Portugal's register recorded 72.9 metres in 2015. The Giant Trees Foundation put a laser on it in 2017 and got 73. An independent measuring project reports just over 75. The trunk is disputed in the same modest way, 5.78 metres round by the register against 6.03 by the other count, and the honest version is a range rather than a number.
What nobody disputes is the shape: a straight grey column with its first branch far above your head.
It is also not old. A visitor's account from 2021 repeats a local story that the Mondego hydraulic service planted it in 1873, though it reports that rather than records it. The register worked from 140 years at its 2015 measurement, which puts the tree at roughly 145 to 150 now. Either way it went up the height of a twenty-storey building in about a century and a half. Portugal classified it as a tree of public interest in 2002, and the marked path in from the parking area takes about fifteen minutes.
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3
The Bunya Knight
Bunya Pine (Araucaria bidwillii) · roughly 140 to 155 years · Torres do Mondego
A few dozen metres from the tallest tree in Europe stands the tallest bunya pine in Portugal, on the same path in the same small forest. Araucaria bidwillii is a Queensland conifer with stiff, spined foliage and a trunk that goes up like a mast. This one carries 3.7 metres of girth under 54 metres of height, and the tree-measuring project that surveyed Vale de Canas rates it the biggest of its species in the country.
Not everyone agrees on the number. A visitor writing in 2021 gave the height as 49 metres against the register's 54, which is the sort of gap that opens up when a crown has to be measured from the ground through other trees.
The species carries more history than its Portuguese address suggests. That same 2021 account notes what the register does not, that Araucaria bidwillii is a sacred tree to Aboriginal peoples in its native southeast Queensland. Here it is one specimen among imported conifers and eucalypts. The register put both this tree and the karri beside it at 140 years when it measured them in 2015, which makes it somewhere around 145 to 155 now, and Portugal classified the pair together in August 2002.
It is the quieter half of a two-tree walk that leaves your neck at an angle.
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4
The Camphor Tree of ESAC
Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · around 165 years · Bencanta
Its crown is wider than the tree is tall: 34.5 metres across against 28 metres of height. The camphor tree on the agricultural college's campus at Bencanta has had a century and a half to spread and nothing in its way.
Cinnamomum camphora comes from East Asia. This one went in in 1860, according to the school, which makes it about 165 years old, and Portugal classified it as a tree of public interest back in July 1969. The trunk has not stopped since: the national register measured 8.5 metres round in 2015 and the school reported more than 9 metres in December 2025.
That December was a busy month for it. The tree was named one of ten finalists in the public vote for Portugal's Tree of the Year 2026, and in the same announcement the school pointed out that the route planned for a future high-speed railway passes close enough to put it at risk. It has stood through 165 years of whatever the campus did around it, and the thing that could finally move it is a line that does not exist yet.
One practical note, because the walk out here is 3.7 kilometres. The tree stands on the grounds of a public college and is visible from the campus paths, but the school handles visits through its external relations office rather than leaving the gates open by default. Ask first.
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