What is the oldest tree in Sardinia?
The oldest tree in Sardinia, and in Italy, is S'Ozzastru, a wild olive at Santu Baltolu di Carana outside Luras in Gallura. Its age is genuinely contested: the University of Sassari estimates 2,500 to 4,000 years, the visitor site that manages it says 3,000 to 4,000, and the botanist Bruno Peyronel once proposed more than 5,000, a figure flagged as having no scientific data behind it. Every serious estimate lands in the thousands, which settles the ranking without settling the number.
Sardinia holds the oldest tree in Italy and cannot tell you how old it is. S'Ozzastru, the wild olive at Santu Baltolu di Carana outside Luras, has been estimated at 2,500 to 4,000 years by the University of Sassari and at 3,000 to 4,000 by the visitor site that manages it, while a botanist's guess of more than 5,000 circulates with nothing behind it. The spread is not sloppiness. Ancient olives hollow out and lose their heartwood, which removes the material a ring count or a radiocarbon test would use, so every figure for a tree like this is a model rather than a measurement. What can be measured is the trunk: 11.5 metres around, on a tree 14 metres tall with a crown of about 21 metres, protected as a national natural monument since 1991. The companion olivastro a few metres away is put at roughly 2,000 years by secondary sources that show no working. The olive at Santa Maria Navarrese is called millenario by the regional forestry agency and about 2,000 years by local press. The trees at San Pietro in Golgo carry no age at all, and the cedar at Laconi is much the youngest here.
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