Wat is de oudste boom van Coimbra?

Two other Coimbra trees run it close. The camphor tree on the ESAC agricultural college campus, planted in 1860 by the school's own record, works out to almost exactly the same age, and nothing settles which is genuinely older: one figure comes from a 2010 classification measurement, the other from an institutional planting record, and neither is a ring count. The garden's bunya grows on the upper terrace behind the aqueduct arches, part of a nineteenth-century collection that also holds thirty species of eucalyptus and a Moreton Bay fig grand enough to make Thomas Pakenham's Remarkable Trees of the World. Three kilometres away, in the Mata Nacional de Vale de Canas, two younger arrivals of the same era do the height and headlines instead: a 73-to-75-metre karri that is the tallest tree measured anywhere in Europe, and a bunya of the same age that is the tallest of its species in Portugal. All four went into the ground within a few decades of each other, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Coimbra's institutions were filling their grounds with trees shipped from the far side of the world.