What is the oldest tree in Santa María del Tule?
The oldest tree in Santa María del Tule is El Árbol del Tule, the Montezuma cypress in the church courtyard, and the most defensible estimate puts it at roughly 1,400 to 1,600 years. That figure comes from growth-rate work going back to Conzatti in 1921 and agrees with Zapotec oral history; published estimates elsewhere run from 1,200 to 3,000 years, and popular accounts round it up to over two thousand without saying how they arrived there. Its fame is really about width rather than age. A laser-assisted survey in 2005 measured the circumference at 42 metres. Planeta's visitor guide gives 54. Neither is wrong: the trunk is a mass of buttresses and lobes, and a tape that follows every fold reads much longer than one stretched across them, which is why the Gymnosperm Database smooths it to a 9.38 metre diameter when setting it against the giant sequoias that contest the title. For a long time botanists assumed a trunk like that had to be several trees fused together. DNA testing in the 1990s showed one individual. The same 2005 survey put the height at 35.4 metres, lower than the 41 to 43 metres quoted before it, which says something about how much of the older reporting was estimate rather than measurement.
The tree stands in the courtyard of the parish church in the middle of town. There is a small charge to enter the courtyard itself, and it is open daily like any other town-centre attraction. From Oaxaca city, second-class buses leave for Tule every ten minutes from the second-class terminal; a taxi or colectivo takes about twenty minutes, and it is a comfortable half-hour bike ride if you would rather. Walk around it rather than standing in front of it. The trunk changes completely as you move, and local children make a business of pointing out the animals people read in the buttresses. The town holds its festival for the tree on the second Monday of October. One thing worth knowing before you go: the aquifer under it can drop more than six metres in the dry season, and keeping this tree alive is active, funded and sometimes contested local work rather than a settled matter.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.