Also known as the Platano di Vrisi, Curinga's plane tree came second in the 2021 European Tree of the Year vote. A dendrological survey that year measured it at 31.5 metres tall with a trunk 14.75 metres round, one of the largest on this whole site, hollow enough inside that a dozen adults can stand in the opening. Legend credits Basilian monks with planting it in the 11th century while building the nearby hermitage of Sant'Elia; the honest range, from field estimates rather than ring counts, runs from about 800 years to well over a thousand.
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Platano di Curinga
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · roughly 800 to over 1,000 years, estimates vary · Vrisi, Curinga
The hollow inside this plane tree once took a hundred sheep.
The opening in the trunk is over three metres wide, and the space behind it still holds a dozen adults standing up. The tree came second in the 2021 European Tree of the Year vote. It stands in the Vrisi locality outside Curinga, off the SP 91 in Calabria, reached by a maintained path, and it is listed on both Calabria's regional register of monumental trees and the national one.
A dendrological survey on 28 January 2021 measured it at 31.5 metres tall with a circumference of 14.75 metres. Older accounts differ in both directions, giving 18 metres of girth and only 20 metres of height. The 2021 figures are the ones with a date and a method behind them.
The age is not settled either. Most accounts report botanists putting it beyond a thousand years, which goes with the local story that Basilian monks planted it in the eleventh century while building the hermitage of Sant'Elia nearby. Other coverage cites a professional estimate of about 800 years, give or take 200. Neither number comes from counting rings, because the trunk is hollow. Both are field judgements by people who look at trees for a living, and they disagree.
This is Platanus orientalis, the eastern plane of Asia Minor, and not the London hybrid that lines European boulevards.
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