The Cork Oak of the Chapel of Santo Antonio, Cavadinha

Maia's council protects this cork oak for four reasons at once: its size, its structure, its age, and its cultural and historic setting beside a hilltop chapel. Portugal's forest service classified it in December 2010, after measuring a trunk 4.17 metres round, a height of 19.5 metres and a crown 15.4 metres across. The register put it at 250 years at that measurement, which would make it about 266 now. Read that as an estimate rather than a count. Nobody has published how the figure was reached, so the honest answer is somewhere between two and three centuries. The chapel beside it is harder to date than the tree. Visit Maia places the Capela de Santo Antonio around 1770 and tells a miracle legend about an ox cart and wine; another source puts the building in the twentieth century. No source ties the oak to the chapel's founding, so treat them as neighbours, not as a pair. Each June the Festa de Santo Antonio fills the hill around them. The oak stands in the paved churchyard, walled in stone and reached by steps from Rua de Santo Antonio, inside an 18,000 square metre municipal green space. It is in Silva Escura, about 12 kilometres north of central Porto, and most people will come by car or taxi. The latest dated photographs of it were taken in July 2021. If you have stood under it since, tell us how it looks.