Sobreira Grande (The Big Cork Oak)

In 2022, 70,563 people voted for a cork oak on a path outside a small Alentejo village, and it still came third in Europe. At home it had already won. The Sobreira Grande, the Big Cork Oak, was Portugal's Tree of the Year 2022, nominated by the municipality of Arraiolos in the contest run by UNAC, the Mediterranean forest union. The case the contest page makes is not a record. It is shade. The tree stands on a path at Vale do Pereiro, in open montado, and its wide canopy is where walkers stop, where the people working the fields around it eat their lunch in summer, and where the herds wait out the heat. How long it has done that is less certain. The contest page gives its age as about 250 years. That is the nominator's figure, with no measurement published behind it, and no source we have read gives a girth or a height either. Treat it as the village's estimate rather than a count of rings. The same year, the Arraiolos council said it would seek national protection as a Tree of Public Interest. We have not seen that it was granted. Vale do Pereiro is about 22 kilometres north of Évora, and you will want a car. Walking apps list a circular route named after the tree, roughly nine to eleven kilometres with little shade on the way, which makes its one job easy to appreciate at the end.