What is the oldest tree in Guimaraes?

One of the eighteen camellias in the gardens of the Palacio Vila Flor, planted around 1830 and about 195 years old by the national register's own measurement.

Can you walk between them?

Mostly. The plane trees, the olive tree and the camellia garden all sit within the historic UNESCO centre and its immediate surroundings, a walk of well under two kilometres. The cedars at the municipal cemetery are a further 20 to 25 minutes on foot, or a short bus ride, and are best treated as a separate stop.

Do they cost anything to see?

Mostly free. The plane trees, the camellia garden and the cedars all stand on open public ground. The olive tree is the one exception, reached through the cloister of the Museu de Alberto Sampaio for a one euro add-on to the museum ticket.

Which has the best story?

The olive tree in the cloister of Nossa Senhora da Oliveira. City tradition holds a merchant set a crucifix beside its long-dead trunk in 1342 and that it turned green again three days later, a miracle that gave the church, and this whole quarter of Guimaraes, its name.

Portugal

Ancient Trees in Guimaraes

Guimaraes calls itself the birthplace of Portugal, but its oldest trees keep that history in a different register. Two plane trees on the lawn below the Paco dos Duques predate the palace's own 1930s reconstruction; an olive tree in the cathedral cloister marks the legend that gave the city its saint her name; eighteen camellias at the Palacio Vila Flor put Guimaraes on Portugal's own Camellia Route. Three Himalayan cedars guard the municipal cemetery. None of it is far apart: the centre, the garden and the cemetery sit inside one two-kilometre stretch of the UNESCO-listed town.

The Plane Trees of the Paco dos Duques

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 165 years · Centro Historico

Most of what you see is younger than what grows beneath it. Building work on the Paco dos Duques began in 1420 for Afonso, illegitimate son of King Joao I and soon to be the first Duke of Braganza, and it was never finished. The palace slid into ruin after 1616, when Guimaraes itself was handed to a Spanish nobleman, and by the nineteenth century what was left housed an infantry barracks. The building tourists photograph today, with its steep slate roofs and half-timbered galleries, is largely a 1937 to 1959 reconstruction: the regime of the Estado Novo added two full floors to the front wing and a third to the sides, remaking a shell into the national monument it wanted Guimaraes, self-styled cradle of Portugal, to have. These two plane trees on the grassy slope below the walls predate that rebuild by decades. Measured at 150 years in 2011, they were already thick-trunked when the scaffolding went up. The larger, four and a half metres round, rises twenty-nine metres; its partner a few strides away is a size smaller, twenty-two metres tall. Stand between them and look up at the palace: the trees are the only part of the view that nobody had to reconstruct.

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The Olive Tree of Nossa Senhora da Oliveira

Olive (Olea europaea) · unknown, the register recorded no figure at its 2021 measurement · Centro Historico

This tree gave the city its second name. According to the legend still told here, a merchant named Pero Esteves brought a crucifix back from Normandy in 1342 and set it beside an olive tree that stood dead in the square, its trunk long dried out. Three days later, so the story goes, the olive turned green again. Guimaraes called the miracle Our Lady's, and the collegiate church behind the square has been Nossa Senhora da Oliveira, Our Lady of the Olive Tree, ever since, with an olive branch worked into the city's own coat of arms. An older layer of the same legend pushes the planting back further still, to the Visigothic king Wamba and a cutting supposedly carried from the Garden of Olives in Jerusalem. What can be said honestly is narrower: the tree growing today in the church's Romanesque cloister, two metres ninety around the trunk, is not documented as that specific plant, and Portugal's tree register, which measured it last in 2021, recorded no age at all. Whatever its years, it stands exactly where the story says it should, in the cloister that once belonged to a monastery founded by Countess Mumadona Dias in 949, on the square that gave the church, and so this whole quarter of the city, its name.

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The Camellias of Palacio Vila Flor

Common Camellia (Camellia japonica) · about 195 years · Urgezes

Eighteen camellias planted across two garden terraces here have outlived the building's most fashionable era by more than a century. The register puts them at around 195 years, planted in the 1830s, decades before the palace itself was extended into the grand house whose halls now show contemporary art. Camellia japonica arrived in Europe from East Asia in the eighteenth century as a hothouse curiosity for the wealthy; by the time these were planted it had become the flower a family used to say a garden mattered. Guimaraes and the wider Minho region took to it harder than most of Portugal, which is why the area still markets itself, without much exaggeration, along a Camellia Route. The eighteen trees here split into two groups on the lower and upper parterres of a three-terrace baroque garden, laid out with box hedges, stone fountains and a view back over the city; the garden won a national landscape architecture award in 2006. Camellias flower through the coldest months, January into March, when almost nothing else in a Portuguese garden is doing anything at all, which is presumably part of why a family planted eighteen of them and not one.

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The Himalayan Cedars of Atouguia Cemetery

Himalayan Cedar (Cedrus deodara) · about 115 years (one of the three dated; see notes) · Creixomil

Three Himalayan cedars stand at the gates of Guimaraes' municipal cemetery, tall enough that they read as a landmark from the road below rather than as cemetery planting. Cedrus deodara comes from the western Himalaya, from Afghanistan through to Nepal, where it can live past a thousand years and grow to twice the height these have reached; introduced to European parks in the nineteenth century, it became one of the standard conifers for an avenue meant to impress. One of the three, in the cemetery car park, was measured at 100 years old in 2011 and classified that June, with a trunk four metres seventeen around. Its two companions at the main entrance, girths of 4.10 and 4.47 metres, were added to the classification later and were never separately dated, though their size suggests the same generation rather than a younger planting. A cedar planted at a cemetery gate a century ago was a statement about permanence, evergreen and famously long-lived, standing over a place built for the opposite. It has mostly kept the promise: all three are alive and, unlike the graves around them, still growing.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Guimaraes?: One of the eighteen camellias in the gardens of the Palacio Vila Flor, planted around 1830 and about 195 years old by the national register's own measurement.
Can you walk between them?: Mostly. The plane trees, the olive tree and the camellia garden all sit within the historic UNESCO centre and its immediate surroundings, a walk of well under two kilometres. The cedars at the municipal cemetery are a further 20 to 25 minutes on foot, or a short bus ride, and are best treated as a separate stop.
Do they cost anything to see?: Mostly free. The plane trees, the camellia garden and the cedars all stand on open public ground. The olive tree is the one exception, reached through the cloister of the Museu de Alberto Sampaio for a one euro add-on to the museum ticket.
Which has the best story?: The olive tree in the cloister of Nossa Senhora da Oliveira. City tradition holds a merchant set a crucifix beside its long-dead trunk in 1342 and that it turned green again three days later, a miracle that gave the church, and this whole quarter of Guimaraes, its name.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Guimaraes? The full answer, with map and directions.
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Walk all 4 trees about 3.4 km, 45 min on foot