The Holm Oak of Parque Bensaúde

Four trees in Parque Bensaúde carry a national protection order, and the one the neighbourhood is proudest of is not among them. That is the cork oak, reckoned the oldest in Lisbon, standing elsewhere in the same park. The official list runs differently: two holm oaks, a red-flowering gum and a field maple. This is the heavier of the two oaks. Its companion, about 50 metres away, is a tree you can get your arms around. This one is not: 3.12 metres of trunk, 21 metres of height, and the low dense crown of small hard leaves that holm oaks keep through winter. The ground was private for most of that time. It began as the Quinta de Santo António das Frechas, a 17th century estate on the road out to Luz, and later carried the name of the Bensaúde family who owned it. Only in recent decades has anyone been free to walk under this tree. All four were classified together in 2004. The register recorded this oak at 100 years old when it was measured in 2017, which puts it near 110 now. That is a surveyor's estimate rather than a count of rings, and holm oaks grow slowly enough that it could be out by a decade in either direction.