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Photo: Ayuntamiento de Lecina (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Carrasca Milenaria de Lecina
Photo: Ayuntamiento de Lecina (CC BY-SA 4.0)See it at full size

Carrasca Milenaria de Lecina

Village edge, Lecina

Years old800-1200
Girth6.1 m
SpeciesHolm Oak, the carrasca/ballota form

In 2021 a holm oak at the edge of a Huesca village collected 104,264 votes and won European Tree of the Year, the largest total the contest has recorded. Spain had named it its own tree of the year the season before. The Carrasca Milenaria is a carrasca, the drought-adapted form of holm oak that inland Aragon grows, and what it has done with a thousand years of space is the whole argument for the drive, a crown roughly 28 metres across, covering some 615 square metres of ground, on a tree only about 16.5 metres tall. Wider than it is high, which is what a holm oak becomes when nothing crowds it. The trunk depends on who measured it. Spanish Wikipedia and the tree's own site give a girth of 610 centimetres; Wikidata records 700. The age is vaguer still. Every source repeats a round thousand or eleven hundred years, and not one of them cites a core sample or a ring study, so this is the village's traditional reckoning rather than a dated figure. Nobody has established it properly. If you know of a study that has, tell us. Getting there takes four minutes from the village centre, along a path between stone walls and past an old threshing floor. Low barriers ring the base, there to keep feet off the root plate rather than to keep you back.

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Getting there

Beside the street next to the cemetery wall of the church, Lecina, Barcabo, Huesca province, Aragon

You can recognise it by the crown, roughly 28 metres across on a tree only 16.5 metres tall, and by the low barriers ringing the base. It stands alone beside the cemetery wall of the church at the village edge.

Free, publicly accessible. A short walk (about four minutes) from the village centre along a path bordered by stone walls, past an old threshing ground; protective barriers stand at the base to keep foot traffic off the root plate, but the tree itself is not fenced off from view or from a close approach. Guided visits are also organised via parqueculturalriovero.com.

Rural village in the Sierra de Guara / Sobrarbe area of Huesca; no confirmed public transport to Lecina, reachable by car.

Sources

Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.

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Carrasca Milenaria de Lecina

For example: “Best seen from the north side around four, when the sun comes through.” Or: “There was a church on this square until 1755.”

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