What is the oldest tree in Rio de Janeiro?
The oldest tree in Rio de Janeiro is most likely Maria Gorda, the baobab standing on the beachfront of Paquetá island, though its age is genuinely disputed. One account has it planted in 1627 by colonisers who carried the seed from the African savanna, which would put it close to four hundred years; another says a baobab arrived from Manaus in 1907 and took the name then. Its trunk measures ten metres round, and it is reached only by ferry from Praça XV, roughly an hour each way.
Almost nothing in Rio has been dated properly, which is why this answer comes with a range rather than a number. Maria Gorda's two competing origin stories are nearly three centuries apart, and neither has a document behind it that anyone has published. The runners-up are no better behaved. The fig on Rua Faro, which became the first tree the city ever landmarked in 1980, is called over 200 years old by one account of its own rescue and more than 350 by the neighbourhood association that was founded to save it. The emperor's tree in Campo de Santana was planted by the French landscaper Auguste François Glaziou, who was commissioned to create that park in 1871, but no source states the year this particular tree went in, so it is given as a band of 140 to 160 years rather than counted from the park's founding date. The two giants inside the Jardim Botânico carry no published age at all, only heights. What Rio has instead of dated trees is protected ones, some of them since 1967.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.