Roughly 1,200 to 3,000 years old.
Photo: boskimano (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Ancient trees in Mexico
Mexico's classified trees keep returning to one species: the ahuehuete, Taxodium mucronatum, sacred to the Aztecs and now the country's national tree. We map 11 trees in 3 cities here. The oldest of them is El Árbol del Tule in Santa María del Tule, at widely reported as roughly 1,400 to 1,600 years old on growth-rate grounds, though popular sources often round it to 'over 2,000'.
El Arbol del Tule outside Oaxaca carries the widest trunk of any tree on Earth, so wide that botanists once assumed it had to be several trunks fused together, until DNA testing in the 1990s proved it a single individual. Seven more ahuehuetes stand scattered across Mexico City's older parks and squares, planted in colonial-era courtyards and still growing wherever the water table lets them. Chiapa de Corzo's town square was built around a different giant, a kapok already standing when the Spanish founded the settlement in 1528. Between them, a country whose oldest trees were mostly there first, with the cities built to fit around them.
Every place we map in Mexico
1
Mexico City9 trees · oldest 700 years2
Chiapa de Corzo1 tree · oldest 500-600 years3Santa María del Tule1 tree · oldest 1200-3000 years
Mexico City9 trees · oldest 700 years2Chiapa de Corzo1 tree · oldest 500-600 years3Santa María del Tule1 tree · oldest 1200-3000 years4 species grow in Mexico
Figs and mulberries Indian Laurel Fig 1
Conifers Montezuma Cypress 8
Southern hemisphere Kapok 1
More broadleaf trees Shamel Ash 1
The 6 oldest trees we map in Mexico
Roughly 500 to 700 years old.
Roughly 500 to 600 years old.
Photo: Wolfgang Sauber (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Roughly 300 to 500 years old.
Roughly 104 to 106 years old.
Photo: ProtoplasmaKid (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Roughly 35 to 115 years old.
Trees from Mexico also appear in The Trees the World Has Written About · The Tallest Trees We Have Measured · The Oldest Tree in Every City We Map. See every city on the map, or open the map to find what is near you.