The Cork Oak of Sa Tuppa

This tree is still harvested for its cork, and it has kept its shape anyway. The botanist Ignazio Camarda, who catalogued Sardinia's great trees and old forests in a 2020 book, calls the cork oak of Sa Tuppa the most imposing and best preserved in Sardinia, a tree that could stand as the symbol of its species. The cork comes off regularly, as it does from the working trees around it, and the trunk carries the swellings the cutting leaves behind, yet it has stayed whole and regular. Camarda measures it at 6.5 metres round at chest height and 9.7 metres at the base, 20 metres tall, and puts its age at 200 to 300 years. Italy's national register of monumental trees lists it too, at 6.2 metres round. It grows at about 740 metres up, in a clearing kept for free-range grazing, mostly sheep, which sometimes rest in its shade at midday, the spot Sardinians call a meriagu. Branches brought down by wind and snow lie under the crown, but Camarda records the tree as in very good health. Around it the whole Orune plateau is wooded pasture and cork forest, so dense and so full of big trees that he treats the area itself as a monumental cork oak forest.