In the summer of 2025, one branch of Sweden's most famous oak still carried leaves. That is now the measure of it. The Kvill Oak is hollow, cabled and roughly a thousand years old, and it is dying. Swedish sources say so plainly, and the national paper Dagens Nyheter went out in July 2025 to report that the end is near despite years of rescue work and expert help. A careful study in the late 1930s put it at 950 years, which makes it the only Swedish oak known to have passed the millennium, and the county administration calls it the stoutest oak in the country at about 14 metres round. The historical section of its own Swedish Wikipedia article says roughly 13 metres instead. Nobody has settled that, and at this size the gap is a tape measure and where you hold it. It was already old when Gustav Vasa took the throne in 1523. A district bailiff, Magnus Gabriel Craelius, wrote the first printed description of it in 1772. Steel bands have held the splitting crown together since the 1950s, renewed in 2012, and in 2005 somebody cut them through, convinced they were hurting the tree. Climbing it was banned in 1998. Vilgot Sjoman shot a scene of I Am Curious (Yellow) inside the hollow trunk in 1967. The state drew a nature reserve around it in 2008. People drive out from Vimmerby to stand in front of it while it is still there.
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Getting there
Kvills naturreservat, near Rumskulla, Vimmerby kommun, Smaland, Sweden
You can recognise it by its hollow, steel-banded trunk, now down to a single branch still carrying leaves. It stands inside Kvills nature reserve, near Rumskulla.
Free. Stands inside Kvills naturreservat, a small public nature reserve the Swedish state (via Naturvardsverket / the Kalmar county administrative board) created around the tree in 2008 specifically to protect it. A marked path (Vandringsled) leads from a car park to the tree; open access under Sweden's right of public access (allemansratten), no tickets or hours.
No public transport reaches the reserve directly; it is a rural car destination, reached by road from Vimmerby or Mariannelund via the village of Rumskulla and Venzelholm, where a signposted turn marks the way to a small car park beside the reserve.
In fruit
October to November: acorns drop, and a good mast year buries the ground in them
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.