Bucaco is a forest behind a wall, and the wall is the reason it exists. Discalced Carmelite friars enclosed this hillside in 1628 and got two popes to protect it in writing, one bull threatening excommunication for anyone who damaged a tree. Four centuries of that produced 105 hectares holding more than 250 species, including the cypress that Philip Miller named after Portugal from specimens he saw here. The eighteen trees on this page stand within about a kilometre of each other, and one of them named a species.
0 / 18 visitadas em Bucaco
Foto: Fundacao Mata do Bucaco
1
Wellington's Olive
Olive (Olea europaea) · unknown, but standing here in 1810 · Largo do Mosteiro
On the night of 27 September 1810 the Duke of Wellington tied his horse to this tree, and the tree is still there while most of the convent is not. Wellington had just fought Massena's French army along the ridge above, in the battle that stopped the third invasion of Portugal, and he quartered himself in the Carmelite convent of Santa Cruz afterwards. Nineteenth century builders demolished most of that convent to raise the Palace Hotel, and the olive survived the demolition by standing in the way: it now sits in the middle of the road across the Largo do Mosteiro, which is exactly where a tree ends up when nobody can quite bring themselves to cut it. It is a modest thing to look at, seven and a half metres tall with a trunk two and a half metres round, and it earns its place on what happened beside it rather than on size. Two centuries of tourists have been shown this tree. The state classified it in 2018 along with the rest of the forest's veterans, and it is the only one of them a general is supposed to have used as a hitching post.
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Foto: Fundacao Mata do Bucaco
2
The Bunya Pine by the Palace Hotel
Bunya Pine (Araucaria bidwillii) · about 160 years · Palace Hotel gardens
Do not stand under this one in a bad year. The bunya pine makes the heaviest cone of any conifer on earth, up to ten kilograms, roughly a bowling ball, and it drops them from a crown twenty-eight metres up. In its native southeast Queensland the trees fruit heavily every three years or so, and Aboriginal groups travelled hundreds of kilometres for the bunya gatherings that followed, feasting on the nuts inside. Australia now signs and fences these trees in public parks for the obvious reason. This one is five metres round the trunk and has been growing beside the Palace Hotel for about a century and a half, which means it went in while the hotel was still a Carmelite convent and was already substantial when the neo-Manueline palace rose next to it between 1888 and 1905. Araucarias are living fossils, a family that was spread across the southern supercontinent before the continents separated, and the stiff geometric spirals of their leaves look older than everything around them because they are. It is the strangest silhouette in a forest full of imports.
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3
The Blue Gum on the Hotel Road
Tasmanian Blue Gum (Eucalyptus globulus) · about 150 years · Viveiro florestal
Seven metres and fifteen centimetres around the trunk, which is more than any other tree on this page and more than most trees in Portugal. This blue gum sits on the access road to the Palace Hotel near the old forest nursery, forty-five metres tall with a crown thirty-two metres across, and it was classified for what the state politely calls great ornamental and landscape value, meaning somebody looked at it and could not walk past. Eucalyptus globulus is the tree Portugal has an argument about. It arrived from Tasmania in the middle of the nineteenth century, it grows faster than anything native, and it now covers around a quarter of the country's forest area feeding the pulp mills, which is why it is blamed for fires and for draining water tables. That national row makes a specimen like this one easy to overlook. Judge it as an individual instead: a century and a half old, a trunk you cannot get your arms a third of the way around, and bark that peels off in long ribbons to leave a smooth grey and cream column. The leaves smell of eucalyptus oil when you crush a fallen one, and the young growth on a blue gum is a different shape and a different colour from the adult leaves above it.
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4
King Regnans
Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) · about 145 years · Vale de Sao Silvestre
This is the tallest tree in the forest and, on the best measurement anyone has taken, the fourth tallest in Europe. The Giant Trees Foundation put a laser on it and got 64.90 metres, with a trunk eight and a half metres around. The national register, working from an older estimate, says 72.9 metres. That gap is worth stating rather than smoothing over, and the honest version is that it stands somewhere between about 65 and 73 metres, which either way is roughly a twenty-storey building growing out of a Portuguese hillside. It went in around 1880. Eucalyptus regnans is the tallest flowering plant on earth: the record holder, a Tasmanian called Centurion, reaches 100 metres, and nineteenth century Australian foresters claimed felled specimens well beyond that. Portugal is not Tasmania, so a tree of this size here is a century and a half of unusually kind conditions in a sheltered valley. It is also the reason the name King Regnans stuck. Look for it on the bend of the forest road at the head of the valley, and give up trying to photograph the whole of it, because nobody manages that either.
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Foto: Soniapampa, CC BY-SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5
The Cedro de Sao Jose
Mexican Cypress (Cupressus lusitanica) · about 380 years · Ermida de Sao Jose
This tree is the reason a Mexican cypress is named after Portugal. When Philip Miller described the species in 1768 he was working from specimens growing at Bucaco, so he called it Cupressus lusitanica, and the Portuguese returned the compliment by calling it cedro-do-bucaco. Both names are wrong twice over. It is a cypress and not a cedar, and it comes from the mountains of Mexico and Central America, carried back by the Carmelite friars who enclosed this hillside in 1628. The plaque at its foot says it was planted between 1628 and 1650, which makes it about 380 years old and the oldest tree in the forest. It no longer looks the part, and you should know that before you walk down. Cyclone Gong hit Bucaco in January 2013, destroyed roughly 40 percent of the forest and took the top off this one: it stood 32.9 metres before the storm and was measured at 14 metres after. What is left is a trunk five and a half metres round, split and silvered, held inside an ornate iron railing, with green still coming out of the wreckage above. Two popes once threatened excommunication for damaging a tree here. This one took its damage from the weather.
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6
The Cedro-do-Bucaco of the First Fall
Mexican Cypress (Cupressus lusitanica) · about 310 years · Via Sacra
Stop at the wrong shrine and you might miss it: this cypress stands beside the station on the Via Sacra that marks Christ's first fall, one of the roughly twenty small chapels barefoot Carmelite friars built at the end of the seventeenth century, the distance between each one measured out to match the walk from the Mount of Olives to Calvary. The tree itself has nothing to do with that geography. Cupressus lusitanica is native to Mexico and Guatemala, and Bucaco's own name for it, cedro-do-bucaco, only exists because Carmelite gardeners planted so many of them here from the sixteenth century onward that the species became identified with this one forest on the far side of the Atlantic from where it belongs. Wikipedia calls it the forest's most abundant tree, and this specimen is a serious example of it: five metres and a quarter around the trunk, thirty-one metres tall, and by the state's own measurement in 2016 already three centuries old, which would make it the second oldest classified tree in the whole forest after the more famous Cedro de Sao Jose a short walk south. No source names this particular tree by its position on the Via Sacra, only the forest's register, so treat the age and the rank as the register's word rather than a settled fact.
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7
The Pedunculate Oak of the Capela de Sao Pedro
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · about 310 years · Via Sacra
Almost everything classified in this forest arrived by ship. This oak did not. Quercus robur is one of only two native species on Bucaco's whole list of protected trees, a remnant of the woodland that stood here before the Carmelites arrived in the 1620s and began filling the hillside with cypresses, redwoods and eucalyptus from four continents. Wikipedia's account of the forest names a stand of oak among the survivors of that original cover, which is exactly what this is: not an import chosen for a garden, but a tree the friars found already growing when they built the convent and its wayside chapels. This one stands by the chapel of Sao Pedro on the Via Sacra, four metres ninety around the trunk and twenty-four metres tall, with a crown that reaches almost twenty-one metres across, comfortably the widest native canopy in the collection. The state's 2016 measurement put it at three hundred years, tied with the cypress at the first Via Sacra station for the second oldest tree in the register after the Cedro de Sao Jose, though no source beyond the register dates this individual tree. It is easy to walk past it looking for the exotic specimen and miss the one tree here that was never planted for effect.
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8
The Cork Oak of the Lago Grande
Cork Oak (Quercus suber) · not recorded · Lago Grande
Portugal's national tree gets one entry in a forest built to show off everything else. Quercus suber, the cork oak, is the species the country names much of its rural economy after: cork bark is stripped from living trunks every nine years or so without killing the tree, and most of the world's supply still comes from Portuguese hillsides. Here, on the south slope above the Lago Grande, it stands quietly among cypresses from Mexico, redwoods from California and a eucalyptus that ranks among the tallest trees in Europe, four metres and a quarter around the trunk and seventeen and a half metres tall, its thick, deeply fissured bark visibly different from every conifer around it. The register gives no age, which for a cork oak is not unusual: old specimens can run past three centuries and nobody has cored this one to count the rings. What identifies it beyond the bare register entry is the species itself: Wikipedia's account of the forest's surviving native cover names oak among its few original inhabitants, the same corroboration the pedunculate oak by the Capela de Sao Pedro carries. Stand here and you are looking at the one tree in this collection that needed no ship to arrive.
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Foto: Fundacao Mata do Bucaco
9
The Redwood of the Fonte de Santa Teresa
Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · about 160 years · Fonte de Santa Teresa
Bucaco's third redwood stop stands on a slope above what locals reckon the best spring water in the whole forest, the Fonte de Santa Teresa, named for the sixteenth century Carmelite reformer Teresa of Avila. The register measured it in 2016 at 5.58 metres round and 45 metres tall, about 150 years old at the time, which puts it in the ground within a few decades of the forest's other sequoias, planted when the fashion for collecting the world's conifers was at its height.
The fountain it grows beside is one stop on the Trilho da Agua, a walking trail built around Bucaco's historic water sources, Fonte Fria and Fonte do Carregal among them, that the forest describes as contemplative rather than athletic. A redwood needing fog and damp air to thrive has, by accident or design, ended up on the one trail in the forest built around water.
Coast redwoods drink through their needles as much as their roots, drawing a real share of their water straight from the sea mist Bucaco's hillside catches off the Atlantic, which is the reason this species does as well here as it does anywhere outside its native California fog belt. This one has had a century and a half to put that trick to use.
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10
The Redwood of the Porta das Lapas
Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · Porta das Lapas
Bucaco's second redwood stands 70 metres from the Porta das Lapas, the forest's western gate, on the path down to the Lago Grande where the walled forest's own cork oak already grows. At 45 metres tall it matches the height of the sequoia by the Fonte de Santa Teresa on the other side of the forest, with a slightly narrower trunk, 5.04 metres round against 5.58.
This is not the pair of redwoods the forest's own biologist asked to have removed from this site in 2026, the two that used to stand by the ruined Ermida de Santo Elias: those are genuinely unreachable, off any path the forest maintains, and came down the same day the biologist wrote in. This one stands on a path visitors already walk to reach the Lago Grande, 450 metres off Bucaco's main published route but on mapped ground the whole way.
Sequoia sempervirens needs fog to thrive outside its native California coast, and Bucaco's Atlantic hillside supplies enough of it that this one has grown as tall in Portugal as many of its relatives do at home, part of a collection of the world's conifers that nineteenth century plant hunters spent decades assembling behind this forest wall.
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11
The American Ash of the Largo do Mosteiro
White Ash (Fraxinus americana) · about 146 years · Largo do Mosteiro
An American ash stands right outside the Loja da Mata, Bucaco's own forest shop, in the Largo do Mosteiro where most visitors start their walk without necessarily looking up. The register measured it in 2016 at 4.65 metres round, 24 metres tall, a canopy 26 metres wide, and gave it a precise age few trees in this forest can claim: 136 years, which puts its planting at 1880, in the decades right after the Bucaco Palace Hotel began rising over the old monastery ruins next door.
Fraxinus americana is native to eastern North America, one of the less exotic imports in a forest built almost entirely from foreign curiosities, but the age and the size are what earned it a place in the register regardless of how ordinary the species looks against the redwoods and bunya pines nearby. The Largo do Mosteiro already anchors two of Bucaco's published trees, and this ash simply adds a third specimen to a square most visitors cross without stopping.
No second source names this specific tree beyond the forest's own measurement, so it ships flagged rather than doubly confirmed. The register's number, at least, is an unusually precise one.
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12
The Sycamore Maple of the Lago da Fonte
Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) · about 110 years · Lago da Fonte
Every other tree on this page keeps its colour year round, evergreens collected from Australia, Mexico, California and Portugal's own hillsides behind one wall. This sycamore maple is the exception, and at 36 metres tall it is a remarkably big one, taller than sycamore maples usually reach even in their native central Europe.
The register measured it in 2016 at 2.52 metres round and about a century old, standing by the Lago da Fonte, one of Bucaco's several small forest lakes. Acer pseudoplatanus turns a deep gold through October and November before it drops, the one predictable burst of seasonal colour in a forest otherwise built for evergreen permanence, which makes this tree worth timing a visit around in a way none of Bucaco's conifers are.
No second source confirms this specific measurement beyond the forest's own register, so it ships flagged. What the register does establish, height and species both, is unusual enough on its own: a European tree, in a forest of imports, has quietly out-grown most of its own kind.
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13
The Til of the Lago Grande
Til / Stinkwood (Ocotea foetens) · Lago Grande
Til is a laurel that should not be growing on mainland Europe at all. Ocotea foetens belongs to the laurisilva, the fog forest that survives today only on Madeira, the Canary Islands and a handful of Atlantic islands, relict woodland that once covered much of the Mediterranean before the ice ages pushed it into a few sheltered pockets. Bucaco's specimen, 38 metres tall with a 3 metre trunk, stands by the Lago Grande, a few steps from the forest's own cork oak.
Nobody has recorded its age. What the register does establish is size alone, and 38 metres is tall even by the standards of a forest built to grow things bigger than they grow at home: Bucaco's redwoods and blue gums are imports pushed to unusual heights by fog off the Atlantic, and here is a genuine laurisilva relict doing the same trick from the opposite direction, a species surviving on the mainland only because this one hillside happens to recreate the conditions its island cousins depend on.
No second source has been found for this specific tree, so it ships flagged, on the forest's own 2016 measurement alone.
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14
The Cedro-do-Bucaco of the Ermida do Sacramento
Mexican Cypress (Cupressus lusitanica) · Ermida do Sacramento
A third Cedro-do-Bucaco grows here, beside the ruin of the Ermida do Sacramento, 30 metres from the Passo de Anas. Two of the forest's cypresses already have entries on this page, each with its own story; this one has a different kind of neighbour, a chapel that did not survive. Only its walls remain, swallowed by exactly the hillside vegetation the barefoot friars who built it once kept cleared.
The register measured this specimen in 2016 at 4.2 metres round and 27 metres tall, a genuinely large trunk even set beside the forest's other two published cypresses, one of which is the very tree that gave the species its scientific name. Three centuries and more of protection inside one walled hillside is what let all of them reach this size, whichever one a visitor happens to stop in front of.
No age is recorded for this tree and no second source names it beyond the register, so it ships flagged.
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15
The Cedro-do-Bucaco of the Passo de Anas
Mexican Cypress (Cupressus lusitanica) · Passo de Anas
Bucaco keeps two protected cypresses within sixty metres of each other on this path, and this is the smaller one: 3.68 metres round, 27 metres tall, with a crown nineteen metres across on the state's 2016 survey. In most forests that would be the headline tree. Here it is the fourth cypress on the hillside with a file of its own.
Its address is the Passo de Anas, a station on the Via Sacra named for the night Christ was taken before Annas the high priest. Barefoot Carmelite friars set these chapels out across the slope at the end of the seventeenth century and spaced them to match the distances of the walk through Jerusalem. That spacing still decides how people cross this forest. You do not go hunting for the cypress. You come round a bend expecting a shrine and find the tree standing over it.
Cupressus lusitanica came from the mountains of Mexico and Guatemala, and it has been planted inside these walls in such numbers, for so long, that most Portuguese take it for a native.
Nobody has dated this one and the register does not try. If you know how old it is, tell us.
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16
The Cedro-do-Bucaco of the Casa de Guarda do Serpa
Mexican Cypress (Cupressus lusitanica) · about 100 years, register figure, exact measurement date not recorded · Casa de Guarda do Serpa
This is the thickest cypress in Bucaco's protected collection and, on the register's own figures, much the youngest of them. Four metres seventy-two around the trunk, thirty-five metres tall, and an age recorded as about a hundred years, against the three centuries the same register gives the cypress at the Via Sacra's first-fall station, a tree only half a metre wider.
Read that pairing carefully rather than as a marvel. The register does not say when the hundred years were counted, so the honest span is somewhere between ninety and a hundred and thirty, and a walled hillside laid out to make imported conifers grow fast is exactly where a cypress would put on girth quickly.
It stands about two hundred metres east of the Casa de Guarda do Serpa, the keeper's house at the northern edge of the forest, on a working track rather than a pilgrim path. This is where Bucaco's classified trees run out: the last entry before the collection gives way to ordinary hillside, and the quietest of the four cypresses on this page by some distance.
One more oddity worth carrying up there with you. The 2018 decree that classified the forest's other cypresses does not cover this one. It holds its place in the national register on its own paperwork, and nobody has written down why.
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17
The Mexican White Pine of the Cova da Raposa
Mexican White Pine (Pinus ayacahuite) · about 100 years, register figure, exact measurement date not recorded · Cova da Raposa
Cova da Raposa means the fox's hollow, and what grows in it is a pine from the highlands of Mexico and Central America, forty metres of it.
Pinus ayacahuite has taken the height here and skipped the bulk. Forty metres tall on a trunk 2.55 metres round makes it taller than any of the four protected cypresses on this page and considerably narrower than all of them, a shape you notice from directly underneath: the crown starts a long way up and the trunk goes to it almost without a bend.
It belongs to the same imported collection as those cypresses, a hillside filled with conifers from four continents behind one wall and kept up since by the state that manages the forest now. A walk of twenty minutes here crosses more of the world's mountain ranges than most botanical gardens manage in a hectare.
The register gives its age as about a hundred years and records no date for that count, so the honest reading is somewhere between ninety and a hundred and thirty. Like the big cypress standing a short walk away by the Casa de Guarda do Serpa, it falls outside the 2018 decree that classified the forest's better known trees. It holds its protection on its own paperwork instead, which is a thinner kind of fame and no reason to walk past it.
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18
The Magenta Cherry at the Forest Nursery
Magenta Cherry (Syzygium paniculatum) · Viveiro Florestal
At the entrance to Bucaco's own tree nursery stands a magenta cherry, an Australian rainforest species usually kept as a hedge or a garden specimen rather than left to become a trunk 3.15 metres round. The register measured that girth and a crown almost as wide, 9.4 metres, in 2016, and recorded neither a height nor an age for it, which for Syzygium paniculatum is nearly as unusual as the size itself.
Wild magenta cherry fruits a small sharp berry that gives the species its name, eaten straight off the branch or turned into jam in its native range, and it rarely grows this thick there. Two centuries of care for imported trees on this hillside, and a spot right beside the nursery that has propagated Bucaco's collection since the monks first planted it, seem to be what let this one keep going past the size most of its kind ever reach.
It is a plainer address than the shrines and squares nearby, a working entrance rather than a monument, which fits a tree that is really evidence the nursery's own methods work.
Nobody has dated it and the register does not try. If you know how old it is, tell us.
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