El Árbol del Tule

Its trunk is so wide that botanists long assumed it had to be several trees fused together. DNA work in the 1990s settled the argument: one Montezuma cypress, one individual, standing in a church courtyard in a small Oaxacan town. How wide depends on who measured and how. A laser-assisted survey in 2005 put the circumference at 42 metres. Planeta's visitor guide gives 54. The gap is not carelessness. The trunk is a mass of buttresses and lobes, so a tape that follows every fold reads far longer than one pulled across them, and the Gymnosperm Database smooths the buttressing out to a diameter of 9.38 metres in order to compare it fairly with the giant sequoias that contest the same title. The age is disputed too. Growth-rate work going back to Conzatti in 1921, and Zapotec oral history, both land around 1,400 to 1,600 years. Published estimates elsewhere run from 1,200 to 3,000, and the local press tends to round it up to over two thousand without saying how it got there. The same 2005 survey measured the tree at 35.4 metres tall, well under the 41 to 43 metres cited before anyone brought a laser. The live story now is water. The aquifer beneath it can drop more than six metres in the dry season, worsened by a highway and by irrigation. In October 2025 state officials held a ceremony at the tree, ran sonic tomography on its trunk and certified it as protected.