Montezuma Cypress

Taxodium mucronatum

Taxodium mucronatum is Mexico's national tree, the ahuehuete, planted at springs by the Aztecs, and it holds the stoutest trunk on earth. We map 12 of them, in 6 cities.

El Árbol del Tule, in a church courtyard in Oaxaca, measured 42 metres round in a 2005 laser survey; its trunk is so lobed that botanists long assumed it was several trees fused together until DNA work in the 1990s showed it is one. Its age is put at 1,400 to 1,600 years on growth-rate grounds. Mexico City began protecting its ahuehuetes by name in 2025: El Sabino de San Juan is 18.5 metres round. In Europe, Florence's is seven metres around and was hit by lightning barely a decade ago, Naples has nicknamed its own the Tree of Thule, and Madrid's in the Retiro's parterre comes with two origin stories that cannot both be true.

Lisbon

The Taxodium of the Jardim da Parada

80-150 years · Campo de Ourique

Six and a half metres around the trunk and twenty six metres up, this is the largest tree in a garden that fills one whole city block, and for four years it has been at the centre of an argument ab...

Photo: Camilla Morselli (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Madrid

The Ahuehuete of the Parterre

200-390 years · Retiro

This tree carries two stories about its own birth that cannot both be true.

Florence

The Montezuma Cypress

140 years · San Marco

Nothing else in Florence comes from Mexico, has a trunk seven metres around, and survived being struck by lightning barely a decade ago.

Photo: Line1 (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Naples

The Montezuma Cypress of the Garden of the Princes

150-200 years · Capodimonte

Nicknamed the Tree of Thule after Mexico's own famous, vastly older specimen of the same species, this cypress was among the first of its kind planted anywhere in Naples, identified by Michele Teno...