O Patriarca (Patriarca da Floresta)

Brazil's oldest tree cannot tell you how old it is, and nor can anyone else. The estimates for O Patriarca run from 600 years to more than 3,000. The 600 comes from carbon dating a neighbouring tree and reasoning across to this one, which is a comparison rather than a measurement of this trunk. The municipality prefers a round 1,000. Several Brazilian outlets repeat a carbon-14 result of over 3,000 years. Take your pick: not one of the figures arrives with a laboratory, a date or a method attached. What everybody does agree on is the framing. The press has called it the oldest tree in the country for years, and that is why people drive 244 kilometres from Sao Paulo to look at it. The trunk is the part nobody argues about. It is a jequitiba-rosa measuring somewhere between 11.5 and 12.3 metres around, close to four metres through, which is roughly thirteen people with their arms linked. Height is given as 40 or 42 metres, with one source claiming 49. It grows in the Pe de Gigante section of the park, 900 hectares of cerrado rather than rainforest: savanna, grass and small twisted trees, with one enormous exception standing in it. Entry is free and has to be booked first. Our pin marks the section rather than the trunk, and the marked trails do the last part.