The Second Olivastro of Santu Baltolu

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.