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Around 500 years ago, a sea captain remembered as Florio Jakob Antunov sailed home to Trsteno from Constantinople with five young plane tree saplings and planted them beside a spring on the village's main square. Three did not survive; two did, and they have spent the five centuries since growing into what botanists call unique specimens of their kind anywhere in continental Europe, trunks five metres across and canopies rising as high as 50 to 60 metres over the village road. They have outlasted the Republic of Dubrovnik that existed when they were planted, survived the 1991 war that reached this coastline, came through a 2000 forest fire that swept the surrounding hills, and, in February 2020, caught fire themselves when nearby weed-burning sent a spark into a rotten branch; firefighters put it out with foam before serious damage was done. Croatia nominated the pair for European Tree of the Year in 2018, official recognition for two trees that have needed no institutional protection to survive this long, only the water from the spring they were planted beside and, evidently, considerable luck. They stand on public ground, not inside the paid arboretum next door, free for anyone driving the coast road through Trsteno to stop and stand beneath.
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Getting there
Village square, Trsteno, Dubrovnik
You can recognise them as the pair of enormous plane trees beside the spring on the village square, trunks about five metres across. They stand on public ground in Trsteno, outside the paid arboretum gate.
Free, open access, public village square in Trsteno (outside the paid arboretum gate)
Local bus from Dubrovnik's Pile Gate toward Trsteno/Orasac, or a car via the D8 coast road, roughly 20km northwest of the old town
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.