The Giant Eucalyptus of Monte da Penha

Seven metres and five centimetres round at chest height, thirty-nine metres tall, a crown that spreads twenty-nine metres wide: the giant eucalyptus of Monte da Penha is built at a scale that makes the sanctuary beside it look modest. The blue gum is not native to Portugal, brought from Australia in the nineteenth century for timber and now naturalised across the country's hillsides, but few individual specimens ever reach this size. When Portugal's forestry authority classified it as a tree of public interest in 2020, it drew a fifty-metre protection zone around the base, banning earthworks and excavation nearby, the kind of order usually reserved for a tree the authorities actively worry about losing. It was already a landmark before the paperwork caught up. Press coverage from the classification describes it as a specimen admired by visitors to the Penha hills, and in 2022 it was shortlisted for Guimaraes' own Tree of the Year alongside the Douglas fir standing a hundred and seventy metres away, the other half of a summit that turns out to hold two record-scale trees rather than one. Reach both by Guimaraes' cable car, a ten-minute ride up from the city centre, or by road.