Valentin is a small rural village in the parish of Tineo, in the hills of western Asturias, and its oak has been remarked on since before Columbus sailed. The Carbayon de Valentin stands alone beside a small chapel, a pedunculate oak so wide at the base that two sources both measured its trunk at ten metres round, and is generally held to be the oldest oak in Asturias.
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Carbayon de Valentin
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · over 500 years, possibly over 700 · Valentin (parish of Tineo)
Somebody wrote this oak down before 1492. That is the documented floor under its age, and it is why the sources credit the Carbayon de Valentin with five centuries at least and frequently more than seven. Nobody has counted its rings, so the range stays a range.
'Carbayon' is the Asturian word for a big old oak, and this one is generally held to be the oldest in Asturias. The measurements do the arguing. Sixteen metres tall, a crown twenty metres across, and a trunk that two independent sources put at ten metres round. That last figure is enormous for a pedunculate oak and is worth reading carefully: ancient carbayones swell at the base, and the tape may have gone round there rather than at chest height. An English tourism page renders it as a ten metre diameter, which it plainly is not.
The state caught up in 1995, when Asturias declared the tree a Natural Monument by decree and put the Prado de San Pedro around it under the same protection. In 2008 the NGO Bosques sin Fronteras named it Giant Tree of the year, and it sits on the Fundacion Biodiversidad's list of the hundred most singular trees in Spain. It stands out in the open beside the small chapel of San Pedro, on common ground with no gate and no ticket.
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