Photo: Karl Brodowsky (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Sweden's claim to the oldest tree in the world is a scrappy spruce about five metres tall, and the part you can see is only a few hundred years old.
Ancient trees in Sweden
Sweden's old trees survived on paperwork. This page maps 10 remarkable trees across 3 cities in Sweden, each one researched and verified. The oldest of them is Old Tjikko in Fulufjället, at root system approximately 9,550 years old; the visible trunk is only a few centuries old.
Five of the ten mapped here are boundary oaks, oaks that marked where one property ended and the next began, which made felling one a legal problem rather than a morning's work. Four of them stand in Orgryte in Gothenburg and were declared nature monuments on the same day, 14 October 2025, after a citizens' group spent years pointing out that a crash barrier was growing into the largest one. That tree, Granseken, is over six metres round and at least five hundred years old. Stockholm's are royal rather than legal: Birger Jarl's Oak at around eight hundred years, Prince Eugen's on the Waldemarsudde grounds, and the elms of Kungstradgarden, which are only two centuries old and famous anyway, because in 1971 people sat in them to stop a metro entrance and won. The oldest thing on this page is not an oak at all. Old Tjikko is a thin, wind-bent spruce on the Fulufjallet plateau whose visible trunk is a few centuries old and whose root system has been carbon dated at roughly 9,550 years. Ten trees so far, across Gothenburg, Stockholm and Fulufjallet.
Every mapped city in Sweden
1Gothenburg5 trees · oldest roughly 800 to 900 years, locally called the Thousand-Year Linden2
Stockholm4 trees · oldest around 800 years3Fulufjället1 tree · oldest root system approximately 9,550 years old; the visible trunk is only a few centuries old
Stockholm4 trees · oldest around 800 years3Fulufjället1 tree · oldest root system approximately 9,550 years old; the visible trunk is only a few centuries old4 species grow in Sweden
Oaks Pedunculate Oak 7
Elms and zelkovas Wych Elm 1
Limes Lime 1
Conifers Norway Spruce 1
The oldest tree mapped in Sweden
Trees from Sweden also appear in The Oldest Trees We Have Mapped. See every city on the map, or open the map to find what is near you.