Eraul is a hamlet in Navarre's Yerri valley, north of Estella-Lizarra, and its tree stands just outside it on the track toward Abartzuza. The Eraulgo artea, the Encina de Eraul, is a holm oak of over five hundred years that was the first tree on Navarre's 1991 list of Natural Monuments and still carries the number M.N. 1. It lost two of its three great limbs long ago and leans toward the one it kept.
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Eraulgo artea (the Encina de Eraul)
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · over 500 years · Eraul (a hamlet of the Deierri/Valle de Yerri valley), about 500m east of the village on the track towards Abartzuza
When Castile conquered Navarre in 1512, this holm oak was already growing beside the track out of Eraul, a young tree by the account of its Basque Wikipedia entry. Five centuries later it is Monumento Natural number one: the first tree on Navarre's original 1991 list of protected monumental trees, and still listed first, as "M.N. 1, Encina de Eraul", in the government's current 2009 decree.
It is not a giant, and it does not pretend to be. It stands about 11 metres tall on a trunk roughly 1.3 metres across, which works out to a little over four metres round. What it has instead is a history you can read in its shape. It once carried three main limbs. Only one survives, and the trunk has grown lopsided and partly hollow, leaning toward the limb it kept. The Basque sources say it still stands firm and sound.
The decree is also more exact about the tree than most people would bother to be. It names it as an intergrade between two subspecies of holm oak, ilex and ballota, where Wikipedia simply says holm oak.
It stands a few hundred metres east of the hamlet, opposite the bend by the San Pedro hermitage, and you can see it from the village street. Every source puts it at over five hundred years; nobody has put a firmer number on it.
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