Four trees in Parque Bensaúde carry a national protection order, and the one the neighbourhood is proudest of is not among them.
Holm Oak
Quercus ilex
The holm oak is the oak most northern visitors fail to recognise: evergreen, with small dark leathery leaves closer to an olive's than to the lobed oak leaf on every pub sign, holly-like enough that holm is simply the old English word for holly. We map 43 of them, in 34 cities.
Around the Mediterranean it is the landscape itself, the dark domed canopy of Spanish dehesas where pigs fatten on its acorns for jamon iberico, and it shrugs off drought, salt wind and poor soil that would kill its deciduous cousins. Planted north of its range it grows slowly into dense, near-black domes that read as older than they are. The holm oaks mapped so far are listed oldest first.
Lisbon
Two holm oaks in Parque Bensaúde were classified on the same day and recorded at the same age.
Madrid
Roads converge on this tree rather than around it.
Cork
This is the oldest tree the national heritage survey found at Fota, banded to 200 to 300 years, which would put its planting close to when the arboretum's grounds were still ordinary farmland, deca...
Geneva
This oak is nearly twice as wide as it is tall.
Malaga
Almost everything remarkable in Malaga's tree canon arrived from somewhere else: Australia, South America, India, the Himalayas.
Sorrento
Three metres and eighteen centimetres round, and it stops at eleven metres tall.
Genoa
This is the thickest registered oak in Genoa's old town and the least documented tree on this list.
The civic group that runs computer lessons in this corner of Genoa named itself after a tree: Il Leccio di via Mogadiscio, the holm oak of Via Mogadiscio.
Dublin
Most of St Anne's Park's holm oaks do exactly what Lord Ardilaun planted them to do: stand in a straight, uniform line and block the wind coming off Dublin Bay.
Lord Ardilaun planted a windbreak in the 1870s that is still doing its job a century and a half later.
Photo: William Murphy (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Rome
Marcantonio IV Borghese tore out six hundred holm oaks in 1784 to build an English-style garden around Villa Borghese's lake, and one tree, by luck or design, was left standing.
Photo: Albarubescens (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The children who climbed this holm oak gave it its name.
Barcelona
Barcelona's oldest tree nearly lost to a housing development.
This oak is the only part of a rich man's garden that was never sold, demolished or built over.
Florence
This holm oak has spent its whole life fighting for balance, and it shows.
Valencia
This oak is the last physical trace of an orchard that vanished under the city growing around it.
London
This oak survived five centuries partly because people kept attacking it.
Photo: Hopefully Acceptable Username (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The October 1987 storm brought down some 15 million trees across southern England and left this one untouched.
Naples
Four 16th century Neapolitan noblewomen, sisters who took religious vows together, founded the convent whose cloister now holds this holm oak, one of two trees the site is best known for alongside...
Bari
Quasano calls its holm oak the Lie Tree.
Photo: Mara Cavalluzzi (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Melbourne
Edinburgh Gardens has two holm oaks, and the National Trust of Australia has a view about which one to look at.
Darling Gardens has two trees on the National Trust's register.
Rotterdam
In 1928 Trompenburg lost roughly 400 elms to Dutch elm disease, and out of that clearing grew one of the best oak collections in Europe.
Trieste
Two official surveys disagree about how many trunks this tree has.
Athens
The largest holm oak in the National Garden of Athens is old enough to have been planted by Queen Amalia's own gardeners, and big enough that it is rarely matched by wild specimens anywhere else in...
Photo: macrolepis (CC BY 3.0)
Hobart
Hobart has been raising this oak's replacements from its own acorns since 2020, which tells you how the original is doing.
Zaragoza
This is the tree the neighbourhood meets at.
Lucca
Seven oaks grow forty-four metres above the street, in a brick box of earth on the roof of a medieval tower, and they are the emblem of the city.
Photo: Graeme Maclean (CC BY 2.0)
Cordoba
Twelve courtyards, eighteen noble families, five centuries of owners, and the oldest inhabitant of the house is a tree.
Assisi
This was the first tree Italy ever entered on its national register of monumental trees.
The famous holm oak at the Eremo delle Carceri is the small one.
Colindres
This holm oak is on a map drawn in 1778.
Eraul
When Castile conquered Navarre in 1512, this holm oak was already growing beside the track out of Eraul, a young tree by the account of its Basque Wikipedia entry.
Imperia
The sanctuary this holm oak stands beside was founded on an escape story.
Mallorca
Its name means the holm oak of seven tops, and it no longer has seven good ones.
This holm oak grew up alone, and its whole shape comes from that.
Photo: Rafael Medina (CC BY)
Mendaza
This oak's trunk is not a trunk.
Photo: Javier Hermoso De Mendoza (CC BY-SA 2.0 es)
Menorca
The oldest tree on Menorca is ten metres tall and stands beside a beach car park.
Modena
The courtyard is named after the tree.
Photo: EliFrelly (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Muxika
Holm oak belongs to dry, inland Spain, to Aragon and Andalusia and the country's hot interior.
Photo: Aintzanemug (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Perugia
On 20 June 1859 papal Swiss Guards and the Antibes Legion came up the hill and sacked Perugia, and these oaks were already old.
São Brás de Alportel
A holm oak beside a row of petrol pumps came second in Portugal's Tree of the Year vote in 2023.
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