What is the oldest tree in Naples?

The Canforo del Giardino dei Principi, a camphor tree in the Real Bosco di Capodimonte, planted in the early 1800s and roughly 220 years old. It grows in the free Garden of the Princes section of the park.

Why does Capodimonte have so many of Naples's oldest trees?

Because the Bourbon kings spent roughly two centuries turning a royal hunting estate into a working botanical showcase, importing camphor from China, cypress from Mexico and eucalyptus from Australia. Six of the ten trees on this list, and more than half of Naples's officially catalogued monumental trees citywide, grow within its 134 hectares.

What happened to the famous Pino di Posillipo?

The original stone pine, planted after 1855 and one of the most photographed trees in the world through Naples's postcard era, was felled in 1984 after disease. The environmental group Legambiente replanted a new pine on the same spot in 1995, which the group still marks the anniversary of every year. The tree visible today is that younger replacement, not the original.

Are Naples's remarkable trees free to see?

Most are, standing in free public parks, squares and a state archive courtyard. The Real Bosco di Capodimonte's outdoor gardens are free, though its museum and some restored sections keep separate hours; check before visiting a specific tree inside the park.

Italy

Ancient Trees in Naples

Naples has more officially catalogued monumental trees than any other Italian city, and more than half of them grow inside one place: the Real Bosco di Capodimonte, a 134-hectare former royal hunting estate that the Bourbon kings spent two centuries filling with specimens shipped in from China, Mexico and Australia. This list draws six of its ten from that single collection, honestly, because that is where Naples actually kept its trees. The rest are scattered across the city that grew up around the park: a cloister platano regrown from its own felled root, a plane tree on the seafront, and a pine that Italy loved so much it replanted the tree after losing the original.

The Camphor of the Garden of the Princes

Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · approximately 220 years · Capodimonte

This camphor tree arrived from China at the start of the 1800s, part of the Bourbon dynasty's decades-long project of turning their hunting estate at Capodimonte into a botanical showcase to rival any court garden in Europe. It has done more than survive the two centuries since: its trunk now measures 670cm around at chest height and its canopy shades roughly 400 square metres of the Garden of the Princes, dimensions that put it among the largest camphor trees anywhere on the continent. Cinnamomum camphora produces the aromatic oil that gives the tree its name, historically distilled for medicine and moth repellent, but this specimen's value today is closer to ecological than commercial: its bark and lower branches host an entire miniature ecosystem of mosses, ferns and fungi, distinct enough that Italy's official register of monumental trees names ecological value as one of the specific criteria for its 2021 listing. The tree stands in a section of the royal park that Naples reopened to visitors after years of restoration, free to enter and walk beneath.

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The Camphor of the Royal Orchard

Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · 19th century, undated precisely · Capodimonte

A second camphor tree grows in Capodimonte's Royal Orchard, arriving in the same 19th century wave of Chinese imports as its counterpart in the Garden of the Princes but growing considerably wider: 730cm around at chest height, a 20 metre height and a canopy spreading across some 450 square metres, making it the single largest-girth tree in the entire royal estate. It stands at the physical centre of the Giardino Torre, positioned beside a marble fountain in a working orchard the Bourbon court once used to grow fruit and vegetables for the royal table, an arrangement the site has restored rather than simply preserved for looks: cherry varieties known locally as O Monte still grow around its base, planted in roughly the pattern the Bourbon gardeners used. The garden closed for years of restoration before reopening its citrus and orchard collections to the public, and the camphor, too large to have gone anywhere in the meantime, has been the one constant landmark through all of it.

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The Robust Eucalyptus of Capodimonte

Swamp Mahogany (Eucalyptus robusta) · 19th century, undated precisely · Capodimonte

Among everything the Bourbon court imported to Capodimonte, this eucalyptus grew larger than any other exotic species in the park: 30 metres tall with a trunk 330cm across, tall enough to be visible over the surrounding tree line from well outside the estate's own walls. Eucalyptus robusta, native to Australia's eastern coast, reached Naples in the 19th century as part of the same acclimatisation push that filled European botanic gardens with newly available species from across an expanding colonial trade network, and this specimen was among the first of its kind planted anywhere in the city. It grows near Porta Grande, one of the park's main gates, dominating the immediate skyline the way its official designation describes: the largest exotic tree in the entire Real Bosco, camphor and cypress included. Eucalyptus bark sheds in long ribbons rather than staying fixed the way most European trees' bark does, a visual habit that alone tends to stop visitors expecting a Naples park to look distinctly Australian for a moment.

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The Yew of the Garden of the Princes

European Yew (Taxus baccata) · documented since 1753 · Capodimonte

Almost everything else remarkable at Capodimonte arrived from somewhere else, shipped in by Bourbon collectors chasing the latest botanical fashion from China, Mexico or Australia. This yew did not. Taxus baccata grows wild across Europe, and this specimen appears in the park's own documentation as far back as 1753, decades before most of Capodimonte's exotic imports had even left their countries of origin, making it one of the very few native species the Bourbons chose to keep and cultivate rather than replace with something more exotic. It has grown into something closer to sculpture than tree since: a gnarled, twisting trunk barely 10 metres tall but 250cm around, roots exposed and looping above the soil in a way the park's own curators describe as genuinely mysterious rather than simply old, the kind of specimen that looks deliberately shaped even though nothing about a slow-growing yew's form is ever really planned. Yews resist precise dating better than almost any tree, their heartwood rotting away as they age, so the 1753 reference remains the firmest anchor for this specimen's real age rather than a ring count anyone could safely take.

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The Montezuma Cypress of the Garden of the Princes

Montezuma Cypress (Taxodium huegelii) · 19th century, undated precisely · Capodimonte

Nicknamed the Tree of Thule after Mexico's own famous, vastly older specimen of the same species, this cypress was among the first of its kind planted anywhere in Naples, identified by Michele Tenore, the director of the city's Royal Botanical Garden, not long after it went into the ground in the 1800s. Taxodium huegelii is a Mexican relative of the bald cypress, native to riverbanks and wet ground across the country's central highlands, and remains scarce enough in Italian cultivation that this specimen still counts as a genuine botanical rarity two centuries after its planting. It has reached 18 metres with a trunk three metres around, modest next to the towering original Arbol del Tule near Oaxaca, whose trunk is wide enough that a dozen adults joining hands still cannot circle it, but a legitimate specimen of the same lineage all the same. It grows in the Garden of the Princes among camphor, yew and cypress from three different continents, one more entry in a collection Capodimonte's own Bourbon-era gardeners built specifically to be internationally strange.

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The Historic Citrus Grove of the Bourbons

Mandarin (Citrus deliciosa) · planted 1816 · Capodimonte

The mandarin as most of the world now knows it was, in a real sense, first described from a Capodimonte orchard. Bourbon gardeners introduced the fruit here experimentally in 1816, decades before it became a familiar winter citrus across Europe, and in 1840 Michele Tenore, director of Naples's Royal Botanical Garden, formally described the tree growing here under the scientific name Citrus deliciosa, a naming still used today. The grove has since grown into a working collection of more than 50 citrus species, cultivars and hybrids, restored after years of closure and reopened to the public with the same working-orchard character the Bourbon court originally intended: not an ornamental museum piece but a productive garden, harvested and celebrated with an annual citrus festival held on site every February. Italy's national register of monumental trees added the grove to its official list in 2021, one of a small number of entries recognised as a collective planting rather than a single dated specimen, the same honest framing used here.

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The Platano of San Severino

Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · regrown from a felled root since 1959 · San Lorenzo

The tree standing today in the Cloister of the Platano is not the tree the cloister was named for, though it is, in a sense, the same organism. Legend credits the original planting to Saint Benedict of Norcia in the 5th or 6th century, using land donated for the monastery, and whether or not that founding story is literal, a plane tree of real age genuinely dominated this cloister for centuries, reaching a documented 8.45 metres in trunk circumference before termite damage forced its removal in 1959. Rather than replant from scratch, the monastery let the stump regrow from its own root system, so the tree visible today, now well past six decades old itself, is a direct continuation of the original rather than an unrelated replacement, a distinction this site is careful to draw clearly. The cloister itself, the oldest part of the complex, dates to the 10th century and carries a cycle of early 16th century frescoes depicting Saint Benedict's life on two of its four walls. The complex now houses Naples's State Archive, and the cloister remains publicly accessible during archive opening hours.

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The Pine of PosillipoYoung replacement

Stone Pine (Pinus pinea) · planted 1995 · Posillipo

For roughly a century, one pine tree on a hillside above Mergellina was arguably the single most photographed tree on earth, framed against the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius in postcards, oil paintings and tourist snapshots from the late 19th century clear through the 1970s, an image so ubiquitous it became visual shorthand for the entire city. That original stone pine, which grew tall enough to be visible from the water sometime after 1855, was felled in 1984 after a terminal disease left no realistic option to save it, ending a run of well over a century as Naples's most recognisable living landmark. The hillside did not stay bare. In 1995 the environmental group Legambiente planted a new stone pine on the same spot near the church of Sant'Antonio a Posillipo, an act the organisation still marks the anniversary of every year, treating the replanting itself as worth remembering rather than something to quietly gloss over. The tree visible today is that younger pine, honestly labelled here as a replacement rather than the storied original, standing on a hillside that still frames one of the most photographed views in Italy.

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The Plane Tree of the Villa Comunale

Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 19th century, undated precisely · Chiaia

Naples's seafront garden holds five of the twenty-six trees the Campania region has catalogued as monumental across the whole city, and this Oriental plane, standing beside the Fontana dei Leoni near the garden's street boundary, is among the most substantial: 18 metres tall with a trunk 428cm across. The Villa Comunale itself dates to the years of French rule in the early 19th century, when Naples answered to Joseph Bonaparte and then Joachim Murat, and its planting scheme, planes alongside weeping willows, citrus and acacias, followed instructions traceable to that Bonapartist administration rather than to the Bourbon court that had governed the city before and would again after. The garden runs along the Chiaia waterfront between the sea and the city's grand 19th century apartment blocks, and this plane is one of three catalogued specimens of its species growing within it, alongside one monumental eucalyptus and a single giant palm that share the same official protected status.

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The Holm Oak of Sant'Andrea delle Dame

Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · undated, mature · San Lorenzo

Four 16th century Neapolitan noblewomen, sisters who took religious vows together, founded the convent whose cloister now holds this holm oak, one of two trees the site is best known for alongside a camphor said to have been planted by Joachim Murat during his brief reign as King of Naples. At 24 metres, the oak is the taller of the pair and the more anonymously documented, no individual planting date or attributed founder the way the camphor has, simply a long-established presence in a cloister garden enclosed by piperno stone arcades and rows of Washingtonia palms locally reckoned the tallest in the city. The convent the sisters founded in 1580 has since become the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, and the cloister, once a place of enclosed religious life, now sits inside a working university building, its centuries-old wooded garden intact around students and staff rather than nuns. Quercus ilex is Mediterranean by origin, evergreen year round, and slow enough growing that a specimen this size represents a very long, very undocumented stretch of the site's history.

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Going there? Download all 10 trees as a map file and open it in Google Maps, Organic Maps or any hiking app. Works offline, no app needed.

Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Naples?: The Canforo del Giardino dei Principi, a camphor tree in the Real Bosco di Capodimonte, planted in the early 1800s and roughly 220 years old. It grows in the free Garden of the Princes section of the park.
Why does Capodimonte have so many of Naples's oldest trees?: Because the Bourbon kings spent roughly two centuries turning a royal hunting estate into a working botanical showcase, importing camphor from China, cypress from Mexico and eucalyptus from Australia. Six of the ten trees on this list, and more than half of Naples's officially catalogued monumental trees citywide, grow within its 134 hectares.
What happened to the famous Pino di Posillipo?: The original stone pine, planted after 1855 and one of the most photographed trees in the world through Naples's postcard era, was felled in 1984 after disease. The environmental group Legambiente replanted a new pine on the same spot in 1995, which the group still marks the anniversary of every year. The tree visible today is that younger replacement, not the original.
Are Naples's remarkable trees free to see?: Most are, standing in free public parks, squares and a state archive courtyard. The Real Bosco di Capodimonte's outdoor gardens are free, though its museum and some restored sections keep separate hours; check before visiting a specific tree inside the park.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Naples? The full answer, with map and directions.
More like this: Several of these trees also appear in Europe's 10 Most Remarkable Ancient Trees.
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Walk 8 of these trees about 4.8 km, 1h 3m on foot