Italy's oldest living tree has an age nobody can pin down within fifteen centuries.
Photo: Robur.q (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Wild Olive
Olea europaea var. sylvestris
A wild olive hollows out as it ages, which is what makes every age on this page an estimate rather than a measurement: no ring count survives in a trunk that has lost its heartwood. We map 3 of them, in 1 city.
All three grow in Sardinia, in the granite hills of Gallura and the coast of Ogliastra, and together they are the closest thing Italy has to an age record. S'Ozzastru, at Santu Baltolu di Carana near Luras, is Italy's oldest living tree by most estimates: the University of Sassari puts it at 2,500 to 4,000 years, its trunk 11.5 metres round, and Sardinians call it su babbu mannu, the great father. A second, unnamed olivastro grows a few metres along the same path, half the girth at 5.4 metres and overshadowed by its neighbour, though nowhere else on the island would it go unnoticed. The third stands alone in the village square of Santa Maria Navarrese, beside a church five centuries its junior, its trunk scarred by an arson attempt in the early 1960s that it survived. All three were declared natural monuments by the region, in 1991 and 1994, and all three are free to visit.
Sardinia
This tree has no name of its own, which is the clearest measure of what standing next to S'Ozzastru costs a tree.
Somebody tried to burn this tree down in the early 1960s and the fire scars are still on the trunk.
Photo: Thiotrix (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Explore by city: Sardinia · Prague · Brussels · Porto · Brisbane · Munich · Cambridge · Seville · every city · or browse all species.