The Oak of Santa Marinha da Costa

Nobody has put a number on this oak, and the official one is no help. Portugal's register classified the trees of Santa Marinha da Costa as a single group in 1940 and gives that group 290 years as measured in 2006, but the group is six species and one of them is a eucalyptus, a tree that did not reach Portugal until the nineteenth century. The figure describes a collection, not this trunk. The pousada's own botanical guide says only that the oak is several centuries old. That is as far as anyone has gone, so it is as far as this page goes. If you know better, tell us. What it stands over is easier to state. A circular granite tank of the baroque period, ringed with stone seating and fed by a small watercourse, sits in the walled enclosure of a monastery that Augustinian canons held for some three hundred and fifty years before the Hieronymites took it in 1528 and ran a college there; by 1541 its degrees counted equal to Coimbra's. A fire in 1951 took the tiled panels along the friars' cells and the stone stair to the chapter room. The state bought the ruin in 1972, and Fernando Tavora spent the following decade turning it into a hotel, work that won Portugal's National Architecture Prize in 1987. The oak is older than the hotel and older than the fire, and it puts the whole tank in shade. Beyond that, nobody has said.