What is the oldest tree in Pirangi?
The oldest tree in Pirangi is the Cajueiro de Pirangi, a cashew planted in 1888 and so about 138 years old. It is one specimen rather than a grove: its branches grow laterally and re-root where they meet the ground, which has spread a single tree across roughly 8,500 square metres. Guinness World Records recognised it in 1994 as the largest cashew tree in the world. Entry costs R$10, by card only, and the site opens daily from 8:00 to 17:30.
Almost every visitor arrives expecting an orchard and finds one trunk. The lateral growth is a mutation, not a planting scheme, and it compounds: each branch that touches soil roots and sends up new growth, which then does the same, so the area keeps changing and the published figures range from 7,300 to about 9,000 square metres depending on who measured and in which year. Botanists put the mass at roughly 70 ordinary cashew trees. The planting is credited to a fisherman, Luis Inacio de Oliveira, in 1888; local tradition adds that he died at 93 beneath it, a detail every source repeats and none of them documents. The Guinness record is not uncontested. A cashew in Piaui state was measured at about 8,800 square metres in a 2016 state tourism study, but no Guinness adjudicator has ever visited it, so Pirangi keeps the title. The current problem is the road: outer branches have reached the Rota do Sol highway running past the site, and holding the two apart is an ongoing maintenance job.
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