Photo: boskimano (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Its trunk is so wide that botanists long assumed it had to be several trees fused together.
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. This page maps 11 remarkable trees across 3 cities in Mexico, each one researched and verified. 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 roughly 700 years (city's own estimate, basis not published)2
Chiapa de Corzo1 tree · oldest more than 500 years, per the state's own declaration; local tradition calls it a thousand-year tree3Santa María del Tule1 tree · oldest 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'
Mexico City9 trees · oldest roughly 700 years (city's own estimate, basis not published)2Chiapa de Corzo1 tree · oldest more than 500 years, per the state's own declaration; local tradition calls it a thousand-year tree3Santa María del Tule1 tree · oldest widely reported as roughly 1,400 to 1,600 years old on growth-rate grounds, though popular sources often round it to 'over 2,000'4 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 oldest tree mapped in Mexico
Trees from Mexico also appear in The Trees the World Has Written About · The Thickest Trunks We Have Measured · The Oldest Trees We Have Mapped. See every city on the map, or open the map to find what is near you.