What is the oldest tree in Tarragona?

Nobody publishes ages for Catalonia's monumental trees, so Tarragona's oldest cannot be named. The register records species, condition, height, trunk girth and crown width, and the tallest of the three here is the plane of the Riera de Gaià square, 23 metres high.

The Catalan register is precise about everything except age. For each declared tree it publishes the species, the condition, the total height, the trunk perimeter at 1.3 metres and the average crown diameter, along with a location to five decimal places and an official record page, and it carries no age column at all. That is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight: dating a living tree without coring it is guesswork, and the register was built to protect trees rather than to date them. What it does record is that these three are alive and in normal condition, which matters more than it sounds, because the same register marks a good number of trees in this province as dead while keeping them listed. So the honest answer for Tarragona is a size rather than an age: the plane of the Riera de Gaià square is 23 metres tall, the register's own figure. Getting there: each stop is a short drive from Tarragona.

Read the full story of The Plane of the Riera de Gaia Square, or see all 3 remarkable ancient trees in Tarragona.

One of Tarragona's trees also appears in The Oldest Tree in Every City We Map.

Over 3,600 old trees worth the walk

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