What is the oldest tree in Setubal?
Setubal's oldest trees, on the best evidence available, are a stone pine on Rua Engenheiro Henri Perron and a box elder in the Jardim do Bonfim, both around 117 years old. The pine also has the thickest trunk in the city centre at 4.15 metres. A melaleuca on the waterfront carries a higher register figure, 150 years, but no independent source confirms it, so it is not the answer here.
Both dates trace back to a single assessment made in 2009, which the state re-recorded when it measured the trees again in 2015, and the parish and the national register agree to within six years across all nine species, which is unusually tidy. The pine is the more interesting of the two. The parish describes the stone pines on that street as survivors of the woodland that stood there before the city grew outwards, which makes them older than the neighbourhood around them rather than planted into it. The melaleuca is worth the detour regardless of its age: it is only three and a half metres tall with a crown eleven metres across, so it has spent its life growing sideways along the waterfront instead of upwards, and the parish calls it a living monument. Three olives out at Vila Fresca de Azeitao are claimed at around two thousand years and would beat everything here, but whether a visitor may approach them is unconfirmed, so they are not published.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.