Sardinia's five trees are spread across three corners of the island and a car is the only way to link them. Two stand a few metres apart at Santu Baltolu near Luras in the Gallura hills, and one of those, S'Ozzastru, is the oldest living tree in Italy. The other three sit far to the south: two around Baunei on the Ogliastra coast, roughly 150 kilometres away, and a cedar in the interior at Laconi. Wild olives make up most of the list. None of it is an afternoon.
0 of 5 visited in Sardinia
Photo: Robur.q (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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S'Ozzastru
Wild Olive (Olea europaea var. sylvestris) · roughly 3,000-4,000 years, possibly older (contested) · Santu Baltolu di Carana, Gallura
Italy's oldest living tree has an age nobody can pin down within fifteen centuries. S'Ozzastru is a wild olive at Santu Baltolu di Carana, outside Luras in the granite hills of Gallura, and Sardinians call it su babbu mannu, the great father, or the patriarch of all wild olives. The University of Sassari puts it between 2,500 and 4,000 years old. The site that manages it says 3,000 to 4,000. The Piedmontese botanist Bruno Peyronel once suggested more than 5,000, a figure that comes with no scientific data behind it and which he applied to other trees just as freely. All of them are estimates, because an ancient olive hollows out and loses the heartwood any ring count would need, and this trunk is hollow.
The measurements are firmer, and they are what makes the visit. The trunk runs 11.5 metres around, the tree stands 14 metres tall and the crown spreads about 21 metres, which is a wild olive behaving like an oak. Sardinia declared it a national natural monument in 1991.
It is not a tree you stumble on. The grove is a managed site now, with a ticket office, a path and a guide, open from April to early November, and a second ancient olivastro stands a few metres along the same walk.
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The Second Olivastro of Santu Baltolu
Wild Olive (Olea europaea var. sylvestris) · roughly 2,000 years (unsourced beyond general description) · Santu Baltolu di Carana, Gallura
This tree has no name of its own, which is the clearest measure of what standing next to S'Ozzastru costs a tree. Almost anywhere else on Sardinia it would be the reason people came. Here it is the one they photograph on the way back to the car. The second olivastro of Santu Baltolu is a wild olive with a trunk 5.4 metres around, less than half its neighbour's 11.5, and that ratio is the only thing that makes it read as small. Italy's national register of monumental trees lists it separately, on its own sheet, and it shares the 1991 natural monument designation that protects the grove.
Its age is the loosest figure on this page. Sardinian sources put it at around 2,000 years and none of them shows any working at all, so read that as a guess in roughly the right neighbourhood rather than a measurement. Nobody has taken a proper dating to it. If you have seen one published, tell us.
What is not in doubt is the species and the setting. Wild olives are what the Mediterranean grew before anyone cultivated anything, and two of them at this size, in the same thin Gallurese soil, on the same short guided walk, is the genuinely rare part.
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Photo: Thiotrix (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Olivastro of Santa Maria Navarrese
Wild Olive (Olea europaea var. sylvestris) · millennial; expert estimate around 2,000 years · Santa Maria Navarrese, Baunei, Ogliastra
Somebody tried to burn this tree down in the early 1960s and the fire scars are still on the trunk. The olivastro of Santa Maria Navarrese survived the arson and is still rated in good condition by the region's own foresters, despite a trunk that is partly hollow, which is the usual state of an olive this old.
It stands in the village square beside the church of Santa Maria di Navarra, built in 1502 and, on every estimate anyone has offered, many centuries younger than the tree next to it. Sardinia's forestry agency measures the trunk at 8.40 metres around at 1.3 metres up, with a crown of 9 to 10 metres. The national register gives a slightly larger figure, 9.05 metres, probably taken at a different point on the trunk; nobody has reconciled the two.
The age is stated loosely on purpose. The regional agency calls it millenario, at least a thousand years, and gives no number. Local press quotes botanists at about 2,000. Neither figure comes with any working attached, and no one has published a dating.
The Region declared it a natural monument in January 1994, along with the other old olives, carobs and hackberries in the same square. It is free, in the open, and a short walk up from the harbour.
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The Ancient Trees of San Pietro in Golgo
Wild Olive and Mediterranean Hackberry (Olea europaea var. sylvestris and Celtis australis) · not documented · Altopiano del Golgo, Baunei, Ogliastra
Nobody has ever put an age to these trees, and up on the Golgo plateau that feels about right. A small rural church, San Pietro, sits 13 kilometres above Baunei on a lava tableland, and it is flanked by aged wild olives and hackberries. Two of them are registered individually in Italy's national inventory of monumental trees: a wild olive with a trunk 5.68 metres around and a hackberry at 5.25 metres, standing effectively on the same spot. Sardinia's own forestry service describes the church in exactly those words, fiancheggiata da annosi olivastri e bagolari, flanked by aged wild olives and hackberries.
There is no age field anywhere for either of them and no source ventures a guess, so this page does not either. If somebody has measured them, send it to us.
The setting does most of the work. Shepherds' stone huts, the cumbessias, stand alongside the church and still fill for the annual festival, and the Su Sterru sinkhole opens in the ground nearby, which is what brings most people up the road in the first place. The long-distance Selvaggio Blu route passes through. There is no gate and no fee, and the church itself is the place to stand.
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The Cedar of Parco Aymerich
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · roughly 190 years, if the 1835 planting date is accurate · Parco Aymerich, Laconi, Sarcidano
A Sardinian marquis with a botany habit is said to have planted this cedar in 1835, when it was already six years old, as one of the first Cedars of Lebanon brought into Europe. That account runs consistently through Sardinian sources, but the page citing it most directly is now dead, so treat the date as reported rather than proved. What two official bodies do confirm is the setting. Ignazio Aymerich began laying out this park from 1830 and filled it with rare exotic species, and the regional forestry agency that runs the park today calls the cedar imponente and the oldest of its kind on the island.
Take the 1835 date at face value and the tree is about 190 years old, which by cedar standards is early middle age; the species routinely runs past a thousand in its native Lebanon. The national register measures it at 4.4 metres round and 29 metres tall.
One detail nobody mentions: an oriental plane a few metres away is actually the thicker tree, at 4.5 metres round. The cedar is simply the one everybody comes for. The park is free and open daily under the state forestry agency, a short walk from Laconi's Piazza Marconi and the Palazzo Aymerich down to the Su Acili entrance.
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