Rio scatters its remarkable trees rather than clustering them. Two grow inside the Jardim Botânico, which charges to get in: the kapok Tom Jobim stopped at on his morning walks, and an African mahogany of 49.1 metres, the tallest tree in the garden's collection. Two more stand on open streets under heritage protection, one of them the first tree the city ever landmarked, saved by a hundred neighbours who turned out under it in 1980. One is the only catalogued centenary specimen of a critically endangered species. And one is a baobab ten metres round, an hour away by ferry.
0 of 6 visited in Rio de Janeiro
1
The Sumaúma of Tom Jobim
Kapok (Ceiba pentandra) · not documented · Jardim Botânico
Antônio Carlos Jobim walked in this garden most mornings and stopped in front of this kapok. The staff have called it a árvore de Tom ever since, Tom's tree. In January 1995, a year after his death, IBAMA set a plaque at its foot addressing him as maestro soberano, and the columnist Antonio Callado wrote the whole thing up in the Folha de São Paulo that week.
The tree stands 40.01 metres tall, one of the specimens the Jardim Botânico put on its Trilha das Árvores Gigantes when the Giant Trees Trail opened in September 2022. Ceiba pentandra is the sumaúma, the tree that holds the top of the canopy across the Amazon and up into Central America, buttressed at the base the way rainforest giants are.
Nobody has dated it. The species is credited with lives well past a century and heights near seventy metres, but that is the species rather than this individual, and there is no ring count, no planting record and no published estimate for this trunk. So the honest answer is that we do not know how old Tom's tree is, and somebody at the garden probably does.
It was standing and photographed as recently as November 2024, when Ashley Biden posed in front of it during the G20 and the picture ran widely.
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2
The Giant African Mahogany
African Mahogany (Khaya senegalensis) · not documented · Jardim Botânico
In the wild, Khaya senegalensis stops at around 30 to 35 metres. This one is 49.1 metres, which makes it the tallest tree in the Jardim Botânico's living collection and roughly the height of a sixteen-storey building. It is a West African tree, from the Sahel and the dry savannas, and it has done considerably better in Rio than it manages at home.
The garden made it the anchor of its Trilha das Árvores Gigantes, the Giant Trees Trail, opened on 21 September 2022, which is Brazil's Tree Day. Marcus Nadruz, who coordinates the garden's living collection, led the first walk. The trail takes in ten or eleven specimens depending on which report you read, every one of them over 25 metres, and the runner-up is an imperial palm at 48.1 metres, a metre short.
What nobody has published is how old it is or how thick. The garden's own trail page sits behind a login, so any measurements it holds are unreadable from outside, and the two news reports of the launch give the height and nothing else. If you have walked the trail with a guide who knows the rest, we would like to hear it.
The height on its own is worth the walk. Standing under a mahogany half again as tall as its species manages in Africa is a strange piece of arithmetic to do with your neck.
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3
The Figueira Gigante of Tijuca
Strangler Fig (Urostigma sp.) · over a century · Tijuca
In October 1968 the state of Rio put this fig beyond the reach of a chainsaw. Decree E 2433 lists it as imune ao corte, immune from felling, which is a legal category the state heritage institute keeps for individual remarkable trees rather than for buildings. It has stood on the pavement of Rua Mariz e Barros ever since, in front of number 678, opposite the SENAI building.
It is a strangler fig, a mata-pau, a plant that begins life in the fork of another tree and finishes by replacing it. This one has a short, thick, grooved trunk and a sprawl of aerial roots that have interlaced into something between a wall and a cage. The heritage catalogue calls it secular, centuries old, and puts no number on it, so neither will we.
One source is all this tree has: a heritage catalogue entry naming the decree. What that leaves you with is a protection order from 1968 and an address you can go and test.
Which is also the honest gap here. We have not found a dated sighting of it in recent years, only the listing, unchanged. If you walk down Mariz e Barros and it is still standing over the pavement, that is worth telling us, and so is the opposite.
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4
The Emperor's Tree of Campo de Santana
Árvore-do-Imperador (Chrysophyllum imperiale) · about 150 years · Centro
This is the only catalogued centenary specimen of its species in Rio, and part of it is held up by steel cable. In April 2022 the forestry engineer Sydney Brasil climbed the tree, twelve metres and more, and fitted cabling to carry two limbs that had cracked over old cavities. He had first flagged the damage in 2019.
Chrysophyllum imperiale is critically endangered in its own Atlantic Forest, and it is called the emperor's tree because two emperors were fond of it. Dom Pedro I and Dom Pedro II both liked the fruit, which looks like an abiu, pale yellow skinned with a sweet translucent pulp, and Dom Pedro II sent seedlings abroad. Catalogued specimens now stand in the botanical gardens of Sydney, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Brussels and Florence.
It grows in Campo de Santana, the largest green space in central Rio, which the French landscaper Auguste François Glaziou was commissioned to create in 1871. Dom Pedro II had brought him over in 1858 to run the imperial parks and gardens, and he went on to lay out the Passeio Público, the grounds of the Palácio do Catete and Quinta da Boa Vista. Glaziou planted this tree. No source gives the year, so its age is a band of 140 to 160 years rather than a number counted from the park's own founding.
Eighteen years after that park opened, the Republic was proclaimed in it.
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5
The Fig Tree of Rua Faro
Fig (Ficus sp.) · disputed, over 200 years · Jardim Botânico
In 1980 this fig became the first tree the city of Rio ever landmarked, and it took a protest in the street to get there. A construction company had plans for a building at number 45 of Rua Faro and wanted the tree felled or cut hard back. On 8 January 1980 more than a hundred residents turned out under it, led by the lawyer Leonel Kaz, and the campaign founded a neighbourhood association that still exists. A federal protection order came first and was then annulled by the same federal body that had issued it. The city's newly formed heritage council stepped in, and Decreto 2.783 of 23 September 1980 made the tree a protected municipal asset. Two days earlier the Jornal do Brasil had run the story across the front of its Caderno B.
Its age is disputed and we are not going to settle it. JB em Folhas, retelling the rescue in 2023, calls it over 200 years old. AMAJB's own history of itself calls it a living being of more than 350 years. The band here holds both.
The fig grew up beside the old path to the seventeenth-century Capela de Nossa Senhora da Cabeça, when the Faro family owned the Chácara da Cabeça here in the nineteenth century. Neither account names the species beyond fig. If you know which one it is, tell us.
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6
Maria Gorda, the Baobab of Paquetá
Baobab (Adansonia sp.) · disputed, likely centuries old · Ilha de Paquetá
The sign in front of this baobab makes an offer: eternal luck to whoever kisses and respects me, and seven years of bad luck for every unkindness done to me. Islanders take it seriously enough to embrace the trunk, which is ten metres round.
Maria Gorda, Fat Mary, is the main reason a good number of people get on the ferry to Paquetá at all. She is listed individually by the state heritage institute, and she was also one of ten trees on the island landmarked together by the city back in 1967. Her age is a mess. One account has her planted in 1627 by early colonisers who brought the seed from the African savanna. Another, which we could not read directly, claims a baobab arrived from Manaus in 1907 and took the name then. Almost three centuries separate those two, so the band here is left wide rather than picking a side.
Local tradition ties her origin to the death of an enslaved woman, Maria Apolinária, said to have vowed to leave a mark of African culture on the island. That is oral history rather than record, and it is told here as such.
She was alive and well in January 2025. A resident of sixty-four years told a reporter there had been no vandalism lately, and that she had thrown three seedlings, all replanted elsewhere on Paquetá.
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