What is the oldest tree in Rotterdam?

The Plane of het Park, standing since around 1800, older than the park itself, which was designed around it starting in 1852.

Are Rotterdam's remarkable trees free to visit?

Yes, all five stand in public parks or on public streets, open at any time, no ticket required.

Why does Rotterdam have so few monumental trees?

The German bombing of 14 May 1940 destroyed most of the historic centre in a single night, and much of the region's soft, subsiding soil shortens trees' working lives regardless of what happens above ground.

Netherlands

Ancient Trees in Rotterdam

Rotterdam's old trees are survivors first and monuments second. The German bombing of May 1940 erased most of the city centre in a single night, and the soft, subsiding soil across much of the region shortens most trees' working lives regardless of what happens above ground; the city has barely 3,000 monumental trees against 600,000 total. What remains earned its place the hard way: a plane that predates the park built around it, another that survived the exact firestorm that flattened everything nearby, a coronation linden, a beech that watched the shipping elite build their street.

The Park Plane

London Plane (Platanus x hispanica) · about 226 years · Centrum

This plane tree was already standing when father-and-son landscape architects Jan David and Louis Paul Zocher began designing het Park around it in 1852, which means the tree came first and the celebrated English-style landscape grew up around a specimen nobody planted specifically for the design. It has since survived two disasters that reshaped Rotterdam far more than any garden ever could. The German bombing of May 1940 destroyed most of the city's historic centre a short walk away; the tree stood close enough to feel it and far enough to survive. Thirteen years later the North Sea flood of 1953 put het Park itself underwater for an extended stretch, one of the worst natural disasters in modern Dutch history, and the tree came through that too, roots submerged in salt water that killed less established trees outright. Today its trunk measures 185 centimetres across, thick enough that the city's own tree inspectors check it on a regular safety schedule reserved for its most significant specimens. Het Park itself is a national monument, 21 hectares running along the Maas river beside the Euromast, and this plane is the one tree in it old enough to have watched the whole modern city rebuild itself twice.

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The Breitenbach Plane

London Plane (Platanus x hispanica) · about 166 years · Dijkzigt

This plane tree has been standing since 1860, older than the Westersingel canal that now runs beside it, and it survived the one event that erased almost everything else nearby: the German bombing of Rotterdam's city centre on 14 May 1940, which burned through this exact stretch of the city and somehow left the tree unscathed. Decades of care since have earned it an unofficial title, the most expensive tree in Rotterdam, for the sustained municipal maintenance a tree this old and this large now requires. It nearly lost a different fight in the 1960s, when a major redesign of the Westersingel waterway put the tree directly in the way of new plans; the city's own head of landscaping at the time, Andre Raad, pushed back hard enough that engineers rerouted the water instead of felling the tree, an unusual case of a canal moving to accommodate a plant rather than the other way round. Its more recent name comes from South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, who recited poetry beneath it in the 1970s and declared it the grave of the unknown poet, a line that stuck well enough that Rotterdam's own Poetry International later gave the spot a permanent place in the city's poetry trail. It still stands at the corner of Mauritsweg and Westersingel, doing the same job it has done since before the Netherlands had a railway.

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The Westersingel Plane

London Plane (Platanus x hispanica) · about 130 years · Dijkzigt

Moving a mature tree across a street sounds like a euphemism for felling it and planting a new one, but Rotterdam actually did it: sometime in the 1960s, engineers transplanted this plane tree bodily from the west side of the Westersingel canal to the east side, roots and all, rather than lose it to whatever roadworks or redesign prompted the move. It survived the operation and kept growing, now roughly 130 years old and widely considered one of Rotterdam's most impressive individual trees, a status confirmed in 2021 when it placed second in the Netherlands' national Tree of the Year competition, a public vote that draws entries from across the country. The achievement is not really about beauty or age alone. Rotterdam has fewer monumental trees than almost any comparable Dutch city, a direct consequence of the 1940 bombing that flattened its historic centre and the soft, subsiding soil across much of the region that shortens most trees' working lives regardless of what happens above ground. A plane tree that not only reached this size but survived being dug up and relocated says something about the species' famous toughness along waterways, and about a city that has had unusually good reason to fight for the few old trees it has left.

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The Wilhelmina Linden

Crimean Linden (Tilia x euchlora) · about 128 years · Scheepvaartkwartier

An 18-year-old queen's coronation once triggered a small nationwide planting spree, and this linden on the Parklaan is Rotterdam's surviving entry in it. When Wilhelmina was crowned Queen of the Netherlands on 6 September 1898, a metalworks foundry in Doetinchem sent a brochure to every Dutch municipality suggesting they mark the occasion with a commemorative tree, offering to supply the decorative iron fencing to go around it. Towns across the country took up the idea, and Rotterdam planted this Crimean linden on the Parklaan, in what was then a fashionable new residential quarter for the city's shipping merchants. The tree's iron fence has outlasted plenty of the era's other civic gestures: it holds its own listing on the Dutch national heritage register, a decorative object protected separately from the tree it surrounds, which is either a bureaucratic curiosity or a sign of how seriously the country still takes its handful of surviving coronation trees. At roughly 128 years old, the linden has outlived the queen it honours by more than seven decades and stands a quiet, well-tended reminder that Rotterdam's grandest 19th-century street was, for one afternoon in 1898, briefly about a young monarch rather than shipping money.

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The Koningin Emmaplein Beech

Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Atropunicea') · about 135 years · Scheepvaartkwartier

Fifteen grand townhouses built between 1888 and 1891 once earned this small square a joking nickname, Rijkeluishofje, the rich people's almshouse, a dig at how sheltered and comfortable its wealthy residents had it compared with the actual almshouses the word usually described. The copper beech at its centre went into the ground around the same years the houses went up, planted alongside a decorative 1890 urn designed by Hendrik Berlage, the architect who would later define much of Amsterdam's own cityscape. The neo-renaissance townhouses around the square housed Rotterdam's shipping elite, close enough to the harbour to manage their businesses and far enough from it to avoid the noise and smell, and the beech has stood at the centre of that arrangement for roughly 135 years, its trunk now 325 centimetres around. Copper beeches are planted for their colour, deep purple-red leaves that shift with the season and light rather than staying a uniform green, and this one has had over a century to fill out into the kind of specimen that makes an otherwise ordinary residential square worth a detour. It remains free and open, a short walk from the Westersingel and Parklaan trees on the same side of the city centre.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Rotterdam?: The Plane of het Park, standing since around 1800, older than the park itself, which was designed around it starting in 1852.
Are Rotterdam's remarkable trees free to visit?: Yes, all five stand in public parks or on public streets, open at any time, no ticket required.
Why does Rotterdam have so few monumental trees?: The German bombing of 14 May 1940 destroyed most of the historic centre in a single night, and much of the region's soft, subsiding soil shortens trees' working lives regardless of what happens above ground.
Which Rotterdam tree is named after a poet?: The Breitenbach Plane on the Westersingel, named for South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, who recited poetry beneath it in the 1970s and called it the grave of the unknown poet.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Rotterdam? The full answer, with map and directions.
Species on this list: Every london plane on the site
More like this: Browse themed collections of remarkable trees.
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Walk all 5 trees about 1.4 km, 19 min on foot