What is the oldest tree in Prague?

The oldest tree anyone can visit is the Beethoven Plane in the Grand Priory Garden, Mala Strana, estimated at 200 to 300 years old depending on the source. An older oak exists at a private castle park in Kolodeje but sits on land closed to the public, so it is not published here.

Are Prague's ancient trees free to visit?

All ten trees on this list are free to see. They stand in public parks, city gardens and one nature reserve, and none require an admission ticket.

What is a pamatny strom?

A legally protected memorial tree, a status Czech law has allowed since 1992 for specimens of exceptional age, size or value. Prague currently has roughly 200 of them, each individually registered with its own protection order.

Why does Prague have so many old plane trees?

London planes were a fashionable, hardy choice for aristocratic and monastery gardens across Central Europe from the late 1700s on, and several of the trees planted then in Prague's palace and island gardens are still standing. Four of them made this list.

Czech Republic

Ancient Trees in Prague

Prague protects its old trees the same way it protects buildings: since 1992, national law lets the city legally register individual specimens as pamatne stromy, memorial trees, each with its own protection order and a fineable offence for damaging one. Roughly 200 trees currently hold that status across the city. Most of what follows are London planes planted in aristocratic gardens two centuries ago, alongside a monastery ash, an island oak tamed by imperial flood engineers, and a beech that split into two trunks on a 17th century battlefield. All ten are free to visit.

Photo: Balaban, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Beethoven Plane

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · estimated 200-300 years · Mala Strana

The thickest protected tree in Prague has a trunk seven and a half metres around, and its most famous story is almost certainly false. Local guides say Ludwig van Beethoven rested beneath this plane during his 1796 visit to Prague, dreaming of a 19 year old countess while lodging at the nearby Golden Unicorn inn. He was in the city in February. Prague historians point out that picturing a composer dreamily sitting under a bare tree in midwinter is more charming than credible. What is verified is the trunk itself: 752 centimetres around as of 2013, up from 670 in 1996. It grows in the garden of the Grand Priory Palace on Velkoprevorske namesti, towering over the wall that has carried John Lennon graffiti since the 1980s, tall enough that most people photographing the Lennon Wall never look up to notice the tree that shades it. Its exact age is disputed: the Order of Malta's own legend claims the 12th century, which is botanically impossible since this hybrid plane did not exist before 1700, while official records put the planting between 1725 and around 1810. Either way it is very likely the oldest plane tree, and the most massive protected tree of any species, in Prague.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: Yekaterina Borisova, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Plane of Karlovo namesti

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · estimated 160-190 years · Nove Mesto

Prague's most photographed memorial tree earned an unprintable nickname for the shape of one branch. The plane at Karlovo namesti sends a limb down toward the ground before it curls back upward, a silhouette locals have joked about for decades. Planted before the square was landscaped into a public park in 1876, the tree is Prague's most recognisable protected tree, with a trunk measured at nearly eight metres around in 2004 and a crown that spreads across the western half of the park. It has not had an easy two centuries. Restorers opened and cleaned a large cavity in its trunk in 1985, propped up the low branch responsible for its nickname, and in 2013 ringed the whole tree in a fence after years of visitors climbing on the very limb they came to look at. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 7 October 1998 for its growth, age and value as a specimen. Estimates for its exact age disagree, ranging from about 160 to 190 years depending on the source, which would put its planting somewhere between the early 1800s and the 1860s. Nobody has found a planting record to settle it.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: Palickap, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Plane of Kinsky Garden

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · estimated 180-200 years · Smichov, Petrin

The largest tree on all of Petrin hill also lost its own sculpture to theft. In 1928 the sculptor Karel Dvorak placed a statue called The Fourteen Year Old at the foot of this plane in Kinsky Garden, and at some point in the following decades it disappeared. It now sits in a Prague City Museum storeroom, with a replacement reportedly still planned. The tree itself needed no help to become a landmark: at 28 metres tall with a trunk 546 centimetres around, it is visibly larger than anything else growing across the whole of Petrin, a hill covered in parks. It was planted during the first phase of the garden's construction, which ran until 1836, under a design by the Viennese architect Heinrich Koch for the Kinsky family, and Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 30 July 1998 for its growth, age and dendrological value. In 2004 it was one of thirteen Prague trees chosen for a genetic preservation programme that collects material from the city's oldest specimens before disease or storms can take them. For now it still shades the lower, flatter part of the garden nearest the entrance from Kinskeho namesti, exactly where it has stood for close to two centuries.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: SJu, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Plane of Kampa

London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 213 years · Mala Strana, Kampa

A countess planted this tree in 1813 to dress up her family's riverside garden with something exotic, and it has outgrown every other reason anyone remembers her. Barbora Kolowratova Krakovska had the grounds beside the Vltava planted with foreign flowers and trees that year, and this plane is the clearest survivor of her garden, now absorbed into Kampa Park. It reaches 35 metres, taller than most buildings on the island, with a trunk 504 centimetres around, and it anchors the northern end of the park right where visitors enter from beside the Liechtenstein Palace. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 8 October 1998. Its exact planting date is one of the more solid facts on this list. Most of Prague's old plane trees carry an estimated age with a decade or two of margin either side; this one has a year, because someone wrote it down at the time. Kampa itself was still gardens and orchards when the tree went in, well over a century before the 1947 to 1948 landscaping that turned the island into the public park it is today, which means the tree predates the park built around it by more than a hundred years.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: Sefjo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Twin Beech of Hvezda

European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · estimated 230 years · Liboc, Praha 6

The tallest tree on this list stands on a 17th century battlefield and splits into two trunks a few feet off the ground, which is why it is simply named Twin Beech. At 45 metres it beats every other tree here for height by a wide margin, in the Star Game Reserve on Prague's western edge, where the armies of the Bohemian Revolt collided with the Habsburgs in 1620. The beech itself came generations later, planted sometime after 1763, when the reserve was restored and replanted with beeches, oaks and hornbeams following decades of neglect. Its trunk, 508 centimetres around where it forks, now carries a binding to keep the two main stems from splitting apart under their own weight, and a wooden fence around its base, installed after years of visitors carving initials and hearts into the bark. Prague declared it a protected natural monument on 22 August 2001. It stands about 170 metres from the reserve's Brevnov Gate, in sight of the star shaped Renaissance hunting lodge the whole park is named for, a building that has watched over this beech's entire two and a half centuries of growth without ageing anywhere near as gracefully itself.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: MartinVeselka, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Ginkgo of Stromovka

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · estimated 140-220 years · Bubenec

Two very different ages have been written down for this tree, 80 years apart, and nobody has reconciled them. One record dates its planting to around 1804, from the earliest landscaping of the royal nursery here under the gardener Fuchs. A separate 2016 assessment put its age at only around 130 years. Both figures come from people who study this specific tree, and the gap between them is wide enough that this page states the honest range rather than pick a side: somewhere between 140 and 220 years old. What is not in dispute is the tree itself, a male ginkgo with a trunk 362 centimetres around and a crown 16 metres wide, growing near the old Mistodrzitelsky letohradek, the former Governor's Summer House, in a corner of Stromovka that used to be a nursery bed. Ginkgos are sometimes called living fossils because the species has barely changed in over 200 million years, and this one is among the oldest specimens in the Czech Republic regardless of which age estimate is correct. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree in 2004. Every November its fan shaped leaves turn a single uniform gold and drop within days, the trick every ginkgo performs.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: Sefjo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Oak of Cisarsky ostrov

Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · estimated 190-200 years · Bubenec, Trojsky ostrov

Prague's very first legally protected oak grows on an island that used to flood every spring until imperial engineers tamed it. Cisarsky ostrov, Emperor's Island, took its name from Habsburg era work to control the Vltava, and this pedunculate oak has stood on its embankment road since sometime in the early 1800s, watching barges pass on the navigation canal beside it rather than the river itself. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 26 October 1994, the first oak in the city to receive that status, ahead of every other oak now on this list. Its trunk splits into branches unusually low, at just a metre and a half up, and the crown that results spreads wider than the tree is tall, a shape typical of an oak that grew alone in open ground rather than crowded by a forest. A 2013 measurement put the girth at 457 centimetres, and the tree is estimated at around 190 to 200 years old, above average for its age and size according to the city's own survey. It stands about 200 metres from the footbridge that connects the island to Stromovka, on a quiet embankment road most visitors to the park next door never think to cross.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: Sefjo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Ash of Strahov Garden

European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · estimated 210-230 years · Hradcany, Strahov

The tallest tree on this list by trunk alone grows in the one corner of Strahov Monastery the monks decided to share. This ash reaches 37 metres in the Great Strahov Garden, the only part of the monastery complex left open to the public; the rest remains cloistered grounds. It began as an orchard tree in a working fruit garden, planted around the turn of the 19th century, long before anyone thought to protect it. Its trunk splits into three thick limbs about two metres above the ground and keeps climbing, measuring 513 centimetres around at the split as of a 2013 survey, a girth that puts it among the most massive ash trees recorded anywhere in the Czech Republic. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 13 October 2007. From the garden beneath it, visitors get one of the better free views in the city, Prague Castle and the rooftops of Mala Strana laid out below the hill, a vista the tree has been growing tall enough to share in for two centuries. At an estimated 210 to 230 years old, it was already well established when the garden's monastic orchard still supplied the friars with fruit rather than a footpath for tourists.

Read more and get directions →

Photo: Limojoe, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Field Maple of the Seminary Garden

Field Maple (Acer campestre) · estimated 160-170 years · Mala Strana, Petrin

Field maples are usually shrubs. Left alone, most stay a scrubby hedge tree, rarely climbing past a few metres. This one, in the Seminary Garden on Petrin's eastern slope, ignored the script and grew into a proper 24 metre tree, the only field maple in Prague to earn individual legal protection because of it. Its trunk measured 285 centimetres around in a 2013 survey, thick for a species whose Czech name, babyka, is usually attached to something closer to a bush. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 19 June 2009, and it stands above a small pond just below the Petrinske Terasy restaurant, roughly 250 metres north of the Nebozizek cable car stop, a stretch of the garden slightly off the paths most visitors to Petrin actually walk. At an estimated 160 to 170 years old, it has had more than enough time to prove it is the exception rather than the rule for its species. People who study field maples cite examples like this one as evidence the plant's usual shrub form is a matter of circumstance, not biology. Give it room, apparently, and a field maple will eventually decide to become a tree instead.

Read more and get directions →

Neruda's Pear Tree

Wild Pear (Pyrus communis) · estimated 190 years · Mala Strana, Petrin

This pear tree remembers a poet's birthplace that no longer exists. Jan Neruda, the 19th century writer whose name now marks Prague's most photographed street on the other side of the hill, was born in an army barracks that once stood near this spot on the eastern slope of Petrin; the barracks are long demolished, but the pear tree that stood nearby when he was a boy is still bearing fruit. Prague's tree survey estimates its age at around 190 years, measured a trunk 292 centimetres around in 2015, and calls it exceptionally old for its species, since wild pears rarely reach anywhere close to two centuries. Unlike most trees on this list, it carries no formal legal protection; the city added it to its inventory of significant trees only in 2013, one tier below the memorial tree status that comes with fines for damaging a tree. It grows at a quiet path crossing in the Seminary Garden, in the lower orchard section between the Petrinske Terasy restaurant and Hellichova street, a former monastery garden open to the public since 1930. Most visitors climbing Petrin for the views pass within a few metres of it without knowing an old pear tree, let alone one tied to Neruda, is there at all.

Read more and get directions →

Going there? Download all 10 trees as a map file and open it in Google Maps, Organic Maps or any hiking app. Works offline, no app needed.

Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Prague?: The oldest tree anyone can visit is the Beethoven Plane in the Grand Priory Garden, Mala Strana, estimated at 200 to 300 years old depending on the source. An older oak exists at a private castle park in Kolodeje but sits on land closed to the public, so it is not published here.
Are Prague's ancient trees free to visit?: All ten trees on this list are free to see. They stand in public parks, city gardens and one nature reserve, and none require an admission ticket.
What is a pamatny strom?: A legally protected memorial tree, a status Czech law has allowed since 1992 for specimens of exceptional age, size or value. Prague currently has roughly 200 of them, each individually registered with its own protection order.
Why does Prague have so many old plane trees?: London planes were a fashionable, hardy choice for aristocratic and monastery gardens across Central Europe from the late 1700s on, and several of the trees planted then in Prague's palace and island gardens are still standing. Four of them made this list.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Prague? The full answer, with map and directions.
More like this: Several of these trees also appear in Europe's 10 Most Remarkable Ancient Trees.
More cities: Ancient trees in Amsterdam · Ancient trees in Lisbon · Ancient trees in London · Ancient trees in Paris · Ancient trees in Rome · Ancient trees in Tokyo · Ancient trees in Istanbul · Ancient trees in Barcelona · Ancient trees in Kyoto · Ancient trees in Madrid · Ancient trees in New York · Ancient trees in Dublin · Ancient trees in Edinburgh · Ancient trees in Brussels · Ancient trees in Antwerp · Ancient trees in Vienna · Ancient trees in Berlin · Ancient trees in Seville · Ancient trees in Porto · Ancient trees in Athens · Ancient trees in Florence · Ancient trees in Milan

Know a tree that belongs on this list? Send it in. Suggestions feed curation; the list itself stays editorial.

Walk 7 of these trees about 4.6 km, 1h 2m on foot