The Cedro de Runa

This tree won a national popularity contest in January 2026, beating 51 other candidates for the title of Arvore do Ano Portugal, Portugal's Tree of the Year, with more than 3,000 public votes. Nominated by the local parish council, it went on to represent the whole country at that year's European Tree of the Year contest, and national outlets from Publico to Diario de Noticias covered the win within days. The name oversells its botany. Despite being called a cedro, it is a Mexican cypress, not a true cedar, the same mismatch carried by the far more famous cedars of Bucaco. What it does have, unusually for this map, is a documented planting date rather than a guess: it went into the ground beside Runa's parish church in the early 1950s, nursed through a weak, yellowing start by a village resident remembered today only as Sr. Alfredo. That makes it roughly 75 years old, young by the standard of most trees here, and this page says so rather than stretching the number. What the age lacks, the story supplies. Press coverage of the win describes the tree less as a specimen and more as a fixture of Runa's own life: present, on the square, through decades of the village's departures and returns, celebrations and ordinary days. Nobody has published its height or the width of its trunk. If you have measured it, tell us.