No tree has been in continuous employment longer than the olive. This page maps every olive on the site, 11 so far across 6 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.
Alcântara. Four olive trees outside a small round chapel in Alcântara have outlived every Portuguese king since before the Braganza dynasty existed.
Agioi Anargyroi, western Athens. 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 years, and popularly billed since as the oldest living olive tree on Earth.
Opposite Evangelismos Hospital, near the Hilton. 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 Athens.
Acropolis. The olive tree beside the Erechtheion has died and returned at least twice, and both times the same legend gets the credit.
Filopappou, Koukaki. Before 1954, Filopappou Hill was mostly bare, grazed down to scrub with the occasional stray olive holding on.
Akadimia Platonos, Kolonos. 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.
San Servolo. 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.
Cimiez. 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, unusually, has not changed since.
Cimiez. 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.
San Marcelino, Patraix. 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 rescued from demolition at some point in its life.
Ciudad Jardin. This olive did not grow where it now stands.
Explore by city: Amsterdam · Lisbon · London · Paris · Rome · Tokyo · Istanbul · Barcelona · Kyoto · Madrid · New York · Dublin · Edinburgh · Brussels · Antwerp · Vienna · Prague · Berlin · Seville · Porto · Athens · Florence · Milan · Venice · Munich · Nice · Lyon · Valencia · Malaga · Granada · Naples · Bologna · Verona · York · Bath · Oxford · Cambridge · Bristol · Glasgow · Cork · Budapest · Krakow · Copenhagen · Stockholm · Dubrovnik · Zurich · Oslo · Helsinki · Geneva · Warsaw · Utrecht · Rotterdam · The Hague · Haarlem · Groningen · Leiden · Maastricht · Nijmegen · Breda · Arnhem · Palermo · Thessaloniki · Gdansk · Ljubljana · Split · Belgrade · Bucharest · Sofia · Reykjavik · Singapore · Bangkok · Hong Kong · Seoul · Osaka · Cadiz · Sintra · or browse all species.