Guimaraes calls itself the birthplace of Portugal, and its oldest trees keep that history in a different register. Two plane trees below the Paco dos Duques predate the palace's 1930s reconstruction. An olive in the cathedral cloister carries the legend that named the city's patron, and eighteen camellias at the Palacio Vila Flor put Guimaraes on Portugal's Camellia Route. Up the Penha slope, past an undated monastery oak, the cable car's summit holds a Douglas fir and a giant eucalyptus, both recently classified. Out west, a stone pine with a crown wider than it is tall holds a roundabout.
0 / 8 bezocht in Guimaraes
Foto: Vanbasten 23 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
1
The Plane Trees of the Paco dos Duques
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · about 165 years · Centro Historico
Most of what you see is younger than what grows beneath it. Building work on the Paco dos Duques began in 1420 for Afonso, illegitimate son of King Joao I and soon to be the first Duke of Braganza, and it was never finished. The palace slid into ruin after 1616, when Guimaraes itself was handed to a Spanish nobleman, and by the nineteenth century what was left housed an infantry barracks. The building tourists photograph today, with its steep slate roofs and half-timbered galleries, is largely a 1937 to 1959 reconstruction: the regime of the Estado Novo added two full floors to the front wing and a third to the sides, remaking a shell into the national monument it wanted Guimaraes, self-styled cradle of Portugal, to have. These two plane trees on the grassy slope below the walls predate that rebuild by decades. Measured at 150 years in 2011, they were already thick-trunked when the scaffolding went up. The larger, four and a half metres round, rises twenty-nine metres; its partner a few strides away is a size smaller, twenty-two metres tall. Stand between them and look up at the palace: the trees are the only part of the view that nobody had to reconstruct.
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2
The Olive Tree of Nossa Senhora da Oliveira
Olive (Olea europaea) · unknown, the register recorded no figure at its 2021 measurement · Centro Historico
This tree gave the city its second name. According to the legend still told here, a merchant named Pero Esteves brought a crucifix back from Normandy in 1342 and set it beside an olive tree that stood dead in the square, its trunk long dried out. Three days later, so the story goes, the olive turned green again. Guimaraes called the miracle Our Lady's, and the collegiate church behind the square has been Nossa Senhora da Oliveira, Our Lady of the Olive Tree, ever since, with an olive branch worked into the city's own coat of arms. An older layer of the same legend pushes the planting back further still, to the Visigothic king Wamba and a cutting supposedly carried from the Garden of Olives in Jerusalem. What can be said honestly is narrower: the tree growing today in the church's Romanesque cloister, two metres ninety around the trunk, is not documented as that specific plant, and Portugal's tree register, which measured it last in 2021, recorded no age at all. Whatever its years, it stands exactly where the story says it should, in the cloister that once belonged to a monastery founded by Countess Mumadona Dias in 949, on the square that gave the church, and so this whole quarter of the city, its name.
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3
The Camellias of Palacio Vila Flor
Common Camellia (Camellia japonica) · about 195 years · Urgezes
Eighteen camellias planted across two garden terraces here have outlived the building's most fashionable era by more than a century. The register puts them at around 195 years, planted in the 1830s, decades before the palace itself was extended into the grand house whose halls now show contemporary art. Camellia japonica arrived in Europe from East Asia in the eighteenth century as a hothouse curiosity for the wealthy; by the time these were planted it had become the flower a family used to say a garden mattered. Guimaraes and the wider Minho region took to it harder than most of Portugal, which is why the area still markets itself, without much exaggeration, along a Camellia Route. The eighteen trees here split into two groups on the lower and upper parterres of a three-terrace baroque garden, laid out with box hedges, stone fountains and a view back over the city; the garden won a national landscape architecture award in 2006. Camellias flower through the coldest months, January into March, when almost nothing else in a Portuguese garden is doing anything at all, which is presumably part of why a family planted eighteen of them and not one.
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4
The Himalayan Cedars of Atouguia Cemetery
Himalayan Cedar (Cedrus deodara) · about 115 years (one of the three dated; see notes) · Creixomil
Three Himalayan cedars stand at the gates of Guimaraes' municipal cemetery, tall enough that they read as a landmark from the road below rather than as cemetery planting. Cedrus deodara comes from the western Himalaya, from Afghanistan through to Nepal, where it can live past a thousand years and grow to twice the height these have reached; introduced to European parks in the nineteenth century, it became one of the standard conifers for an avenue meant to impress. One of the three, in the cemetery car park, was measured at 100 years old in 2011 and classified that June, with a trunk four metres seventeen around. Its two companions at the main entrance, girths of 4.10 and 4.47 metres, were added to the classification later and were never separately dated, though their size suggests the same generation rather than a younger planting. A cedar planted at a cemetery gate a century ago was a statement about permanence, evergreen and famously long-lived, standing over a place built for the opposite. It has mostly kept the promise: all three are alive and, unlike the graves around them, still growing.
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5
The Oak of Santa Marinha da Costa
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · several centuries, never separately dated · Costa (the Penha slope)
Nobody has put a number on this oak, and the official one is no help. Portugal's register classified the trees of Santa Marinha da Costa as a single group in 1940 and gives that group 290 years as measured in 2006, but the group is six species and one of them is a eucalyptus, a tree that did not reach Portugal until the nineteenth century. The figure describes a collection, not this trunk. The pousada's own botanical guide says only that the oak is several centuries old. That is as far as anyone has gone, so it is as far as this page goes. If you know better, tell us.
What it stands over is easier to state. A circular granite tank of the baroque period, ringed with stone seating and fed by a small watercourse, sits in the walled enclosure of a monastery that Augustinian canons held for some three hundred and fifty years before the Hieronymites took it in 1528 and ran a college there; by 1541 its degrees counted equal to Coimbra's. A fire in 1951 took the tiled panels along the friars' cells and the stone stair to the chapter room. The state bought the ruin in 1972, and Fernando Tavora spent the following decade turning it into a hotel, work that won Portugal's National Architecture Prize in 1987.
The oak is older than the hotel and older than the fire, and it puts the whole tank in shade. Beyond that, nobody has said.
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6
The Stone Pine of Silvares
Stone Pine (Pinus pinea) · about 115 years · Silvares
This pine is as wide as it is tall and it stands in the middle of a roundabout. Portugal's register measures it at 26 metres high with a crown 26.4 metres across, on a trunk 3.8 metres round, held over a road junction on the old ER 206 in Silvares. It was 100 years old when the register measured it in 2011, which makes it about 115 now, and it was classified of public interest in June that year. Guimaraes municipality has exactly three stone pines with that status and this was the first.
Pinus pinea is the umbrella pine, the silhouette on every postcard of the Portuguese coast, and the shape is not decoration. It sheds its lower branches as it goes up and pushes everything sideways into a flat parasol on a bare column, a design for catching light above competitors rather than beside them. In a plantation it does this modestly. With light on every side, as here, it does it to the limit, which is how a tree ends up with a crown wider than it is tall.
It also drops pinhoes, the pine nuts that go into Portuguese Christmas cooking. The cones take three years on the branch before they open, which is a long wait for one afternoon of gathering.
There is no gate and no ticket here. There is a roundabout, and a hundred-year-old parasol standing in the middle of it.
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7
The Douglas Fir of Monte da Penha
Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) · roughly 90 years · Monte da Penha
Guimaraes' cable car climbs 1.7 kilometres up Monte da Penha in about ten minutes, and at the top, beside the art-deco sanctuary that gives the mountain its shrine, stands a Douglas fir nobody had separately catalogued until the city's own tree register caught up with it in 2021.
Two earlier passes at this site both missed it, folded by mistake into a huge, 790-specimen forest classification that covers most of Penha's woodland and cannot be visited as a single tree. This one is different: individually designated, its own case number, its own protection order. It measures 4.8 metres round and stands 35 metres tall, big enough that in 2022 it made the shortlist for Guimaraes' own Tree of the Year.
Douglas fir is native to the Pacific coast of North America, planted across Europe from the mid-1800s for timber and, on hilltops like this one, for the view a fast-growing conifer gives quickly. The register puts this specimen at roughly ninety years, though nobody has published the year it went into the ground, so treat the number as the register's own reading rather than a certainty.
Its neighbour, a giant eucalyptus a hundred and seventy metres away, shares the same summit and the same story: overlooked, then found. Together they make Monte da Penha two stops rather than one.
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8
The Giant Eucalyptus of Monte da Penha
Tasmanian Blue Gum (Eucalyptus globulus) · roughly a century · Monte da Penha
Seven metres and five centimetres round at chest height, thirty-nine metres tall, a crown that spreads twenty-nine metres wide: the giant eucalyptus of Monte da Penha is built at a scale that makes the sanctuary beside it look modest.
The blue gum is not native to Portugal, brought from Australia in the nineteenth century for timber and now naturalised across the country's hillsides, but few individual specimens ever reach this size. When Portugal's forestry authority classified it as a tree of public interest in 2020, it drew a fifty-metre protection zone around the base, banning earthworks and excavation nearby, the kind of order usually reserved for a tree the authorities actively worry about losing.
It was already a landmark before the paperwork caught up. Press coverage from the classification describes it as a specimen admired by visitors to the Penha hills, and in 2022 it was shortlisted for Guimaraes' own Tree of the Year alongside the Douglas fir standing a hundred and seventy metres away, the other half of a summit that turns out to hold two record-scale trees rather than one.
Reach both by Guimaraes' cable car, a ten-minute ride up from the city centre, or by road.
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