In fruit
A road-widening scheme once looked at this olive and saw an obstacle.
Olive
Olea europaea
No tree has been in continuous employment longer than the olive. We map 25 of them, in 18 cities.
Humans have cultivated it for at least six thousand years, and individual trees stay on the payroll for a thousand or more, still setting fruit on trunks so twisted and split they look geological rather than botanical. That endurance is built in: an olive regrows from its base after fire, frost or felling, so the gnarled base can be many centuries older than every branch above it. The ancient world treated the tree accordingly, as the literal embodiment of peace, victory and civic pride; Athens named itself over one. The olives mapped so far, some relocated into city squares, some in their original groves, are listed oldest first.
Lisbon
In fruit
Four olive trees outside a small round chapel in Alcântara have outlived every Portuguese king since before the Braganza dynasty existed.
Photo: Vampiregrave (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Alicante
In fruit
Three olives stand close enough together in Plaza de Galicia to read as one small grove: the thickest just over three metres round, the other two a little more than half that.
Venice
In fruit
This olive tree grows in a garden originally planted to stock a pharmacy, on an island whose most recent past was Italy's largest asylum for the criminally insane.
Barcelona
In fruit
The city's own register dates this wild olive to 1771, which would make it older than the tree Barcelona calls its oldest.
Photo: Pere Lopez Brosa (pere prlpz) (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Guimaraes
In fruit
This tree gave the city its second name.
Palma de Mallorca
In fruit
This olive is older than the square it stands in, and it has only been standing there since 1989.
Photo: Z thomas (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Valencia
In fruit
This olive has stood through more than a dozen generations of Valencians without ever needing to move, unlike almost every other tree on this list, which the city has planted, transplanted or rescu...
Malaga
In fruit
This olive did not grow where it now stands.
Photo: Daniel Capilla (Dcapillae) (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Nice
In fruit
Franciscan monks reached this hilltop above Nice in 1546 and laid out a grid-patterned vegetable and orchard garden following the monastic planting rules of Albert the Great, a layout that, unusual...
Photo: Édouard Hue (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In fruit
Henri Matisse spent the last years of his life a short walk from this hill and asked to be buried on it, under a tree rather than inside a mausoleum.
Athens
In fruit
A tree in a pocket park behind a suburban church carries a claim that would make it older than the Parthenon: officially attested by the Hellenic Archaeological Society in 1919 at more than 2,500 y...
Photo: ELENITSA1976 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fruit
In December 2015, a construction crew dug up an entire mature olive tree in the village of Elaionas, in the hills above Aigio, and drove it more than 200 kilometres to a traffic island in central A...
Photo: George E. Koronaios (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fruit
The Sacred Olive Tree of the AcropolisContinuously renewed
The olive tree beside the Erechtheion has died and returned at least twice, and both times the same legend gets the credit.
Photo: George E. Koronaios (CC BY-SA 2.0)
In fruit
The Olive Woodland of Filopappou HillDeliberately planted, not inherited
Before 1954, Filopappou Hill was mostly bare, grazed down to scrub with the occasional stray olive holding on.
Photo: Joseph Hubbard (CC BY)
The Regrown Olive of Plato's AcademyYoung regrowth
In fruit
A city bus ended nearly 2,400 years of continuous shade in 1976, when it struck and split the trunk of the olive tree beneath which Plato is said to have taught.
Zaragoza
In fruit
Four metres ninety around at the ground and two metres fifty at chest height, on a tree only five metres tall.
Cordoba
In fruit
This tree is on a map drawn in 1741, which is a rarer thing than being old.
Photo: Luca Volpi (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Lima
The longest-lived tree on Lima's heritage register is an olive, and the studies San Isidro cites put it in the ground between 1637 and 1643, planted by the Dominican friar Martin de Porres, who was...
Photo: Guillermo Carlos Gómez (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Bucaco
In fruit
On the night of 27 September 1810 the Duke of Wellington tied his horse to this tree, and the tree is still there while most of the convent is not.
Photo: Fundacao Mata do Bucaco
Fara in Sabina
In fruit
Four estimates of this olive's age are on the record and they span more than a thousand years.
Photo: Edoardo Berionni Berna (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Azeitao
Three olive trees stand together on the shoulder of the EN10, and local tradition puts them at close to 2,000 years old.
Crete
In fruit
Two sets of scientists have dated this olive and their answers differ by two thousand years.
Photo: Eric Nagle (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fruit
Somebody grafted this tree in the Bronze Age and it is still carrying the join.
Photo: Unukorno (CC BY 4.0)
Cyprus
In fruit
This olive is wider around than it is tall.
Explore by city: Lisbon · Alicante · Venice · Barcelona · Guimaraes · Palma de Mallorca · Valencia · Malaga · Nice · Athens · Cordoba · Lima · Bucaco · Crete · Cyprus · every city · or browse all species.