The Plane Tree of Rossio

A single tree from 1838 now needs twenty steel props just to hold itself together. Portalegre's own physician and botanist, José Maria Grande, planted this plane in what is now the Jardim do Rossio, and its lowest branches have since spread so far sideways that the town installed a ring of posts to carry weight the trunk alone can no longer manage, turning the canopy into something closer to a pergola than an ordinary crown. The growth is documented rather than guessed at. An 1894 survey measured the trunk at 3 metres round and the canopy at 24 metres across; more recent measurements put the same tree at roughly 7 metres round and a canopy spanning about 37 metres, among the widest of any plane tree recorded on the Iberian Peninsula. In 1938 it became the first tree in Portugal ever classified a Monument of Public Interest, decades before the country had any general law protecting old trees at all. It has kept collecting titles since. Portalegre's plane won the national Árvore Portuguesa do Ano contest for the year 2021, then placed fourth in the European Tree of the Year the following spring. It still shades the same square Grande planted it in, free to sit under any day of the year.