The Douglas Fir of Monte da Penha

Guimaraes' cable car climbs 1.7 kilometres up Monte da Penha in about ten minutes, and at the top, beside the art-deco sanctuary that gives the mountain its shrine, stands a Douglas fir nobody had separately catalogued until the city's own tree register caught up with it in 2021. It is easy to confuse with the huge, 790-specimen forest classification that covers most of Penha's woodland and cannot be visited as a single tree. This one is different: individually designated, its own case number, its own protection order. It measures 4.8 metres round and stands 35 metres tall, big enough that in 2022 it made the shortlist for Guimaraes' own Tree of the Year. Douglas fir is native to the Pacific coast of North America, planted across Europe from the mid-1800s for timber and, on hilltops like this one, for the view a fast-growing conifer gives quickly. The register puts this specimen at roughly ninety years, though nobody has published the year it went into the ground, so treat the number as the register's own reading rather than a certainty. Its neighbour, a giant eucalyptus a hundred and seventy metres away, shares the same summit and the same story: overlooked, then found. Together they make Monte da Penha two stops rather than one.