The Chestnut of Vales (Castanheiro de Vales)

Portugal's thickest chestnut stands on private farmland, and its owner wants you to come in. By every report, whoever is passing through the village of Vales is invited onto the land to look at what one Portuguese forestry site called the source of the owner's pride. It is worth the invitation. The trunk is 14 metres round and the crown reaches 21 metres, figures repeated identically by Portugal's forestry press and by the municipality of Vila Pouca de Aguiar. The European contest gave its trunk as 4.5 metres wide, which is not a second opinion but the same tree measured across rather than around. Its age is only ever given as about a thousand years; nobody has counted rings or found a planting record, so treat that as a round number for a very old tree. The hills around it are gold country. Tresminas, a short distance away, was one of the largest Roman gold mines in Iberia, and locally the chestnut is linked with it, though the Romans had gone for centuries by the time a thousand-year-old tree would have sprouted. What the village remembers with more certainty is generations of children playing in and around its hollow trunk. In 2020 Portugal voted it Tree of the Year, and it went on to finish sixth in Europe with more than 17,000 votes. The state lists it as a Tree of Public Interest. The pin is approximate, so ask in Vales.