The Lovers' Banyan Tree
Approximate location.
You need a ticket to see this treePaid entry. Stands inside the Quinta das Lágrimas gardens, a historic estate and hotel grounds with a small public admission fee (reports of around 1 euro for the adjoining Fontes dos Lagrimas fountain area; the wider gardens charge a modest ticket too); open daily to visitors, not restricted to hotel guests.
Europe's second favourite tree of 2025 started life as a seed traded with Sydney. In the 19th century an aristocratic tree collector at Quinta das Lágrimas swapped seeds with the Sydney Botanic Garden, and this Moreton Bay fig is what came of it: a huge trunk, buttress roots spreading over the ground and a canopy that drops aerial roots towards it. That habit is why everyone calls it a banyan. Botanically it is not one, and nobody seems to mind. The setting is older than the tree by five centuries. It grows beside the Fountain of Lovers, in the gardens that Portuguese tradition gives to the story of Pedro I and Inês de Castro, the 14th-century romance that ended with her murder and has been retold ever since. A tree planted in the 1800s has become part of a legend it arrived far too late to witness, which is what happens when you grow in the right place. In the 2025 European Tree of the Year it came second with 43,427 votes, nominated by the Fundação Inês de Castro, and it is one of the most photographed single trees in Portugal. The 19th-century planting puts it somewhere around 130 to 160 years old. Nobody has published a girth or a height we could confirm, so if you measure it, tell us.
Quinta das Lágrimas gardens, Rua António Augusto Gonçalves, Santa Clara, Coimbra, Portugal You can recognise it by the aerial roots hanging from the canopy and the buttress roots around its huge trunk, the one giant fig in the garden. It stands beside the Fountain of Lovers in the Quinta das Lágrimas gardens.
About a 20-25 minute walk south of central Coimbra (Santa Clara side of the Mondego); local buses serve the Quinta das Lágrimas stop