The Holm Oak of Carrer de l'Encarnacio about 250 years
Vila de Gracia. Barcelona's oldest tree nearly lost to a housing development.
Holm Oak
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. This page maps every holm oak on the site, 11 so far across 10 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.
London
The Fulham Palace Oak 500+ years
Fulham. This oak survived five centuries partly because people kept attacking it.
Rome
The Leccio of the Lake 176-300 years, disputed
Villa Borghese, Pinciano. 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.
Barcelona
Madrid
The Holm Oak of the Trillo Roundabout about 300 years
Casa de Campo. Roads converge on this tree rather than around it.
Dublin
The Many-Trunked Holm Oak of St Anne's Park 140 years
Raheny / Clontarf. 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.
The Holm Oak Avenue 155 years
Raheny / Clontarf. Lord Ardilaun planted a windbreak in the 1870s that is still doing its job a century and a half later.
Athens
The Holm Oak of the National Garden 150+ years
Syntagma. 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 Greece.
Florence
The Leccio of the Cascine estimated over 100 years
Parco delle Cascine. This holm oak has spent its whole life fighting for balance, and it shows.
Valencia
The Holm Oak of Avenida de Aragon undated, called centuries-old
Algiros. This oak is the last physical trace of an orchard that vanished under the city growing around it.
Malaga
The Native Oak of Malaga Park undated, mature
Centro Historico. Almost everything remarkable in Malaga's tree canon arrived from somewhere else: Australia, South America, India, the Himalayas.
Naples
The Holm Oak of Sant'Andrea delle Dame undated, mature
San Lorenzo. 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 a camphor said to have been planted by Joachim Murat during his brief reign as King of Naples.
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