The Olive Tree of Nossa Senhora da Oliveira

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.