The Karri Knight

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.