What is the oldest tree in Girona?
Nobody publishes ages for Catalonia's monumental trees, so the oldest around Girona cannot be named. The biggest by trunk is the sweet chestnut at the Pla de Sant Nicolau, 9.70 metres round, and the tallest is the sessile oak at Ca n'Iglesies in Osor, at 38.5 metres.
Catalonia's register measures everything except age. Each declared monumental tree gets a species, a condition, a total height, a trunk perimeter at 1.3 metres, a mean crown diameter, a location to five decimal places and an official record page, and there is no age column anywhere in it. So the ranking has to be by size, and around Girona the two ends of it are clear. The sweet chestnut behind the hermitage at the Pla de Sant Nicolau has a trunk 9.70 metres round, more than twice anything else here, and the register marks its condition as declining, which is worth knowing before travelling. The sessile oak at Ca n'Iglesies in Osor is 38.5 metres tall, which is remarkable for the species this far south, and it stands inside a designated natural area in the Guilleries. Both are protected under the 1987 law that makes felling a declared tree illegal. What the register does record and most do not is whether each tree is alive: a good number of entries near Girona are marked dead and kept on the list, and none of those is on this page. Getting to Osor: about 21 km southwest of Girona by mountain road.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.