Veľké Borové maps two trees. A wild Scots pine on the hillside above the village won Slovakia's very first Tree of the Year in 2004, but no dated sighting has confirmed it standing since a hiking route to it was abandoned in 2014. A day trip away above the village of Žiar stands a wild apple that finished second in the 2026 European Tree of the Year, an untended tree at a field's edge that nobody planted on purpose.
0 of 2 visited in Veľké Borové
Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris) · 250-350 years · Veľké Borové, Liptovský Mikuláš District
When Slovakia crowned its very first Tree of the Year in 2004, the winner was a Scots pine growing wild on a forested hillside above the small village of Veľké Borové, at the foot of Súšava hill.
At 23 metres tall and 460 centimetres round at chest height, it is a genuinely large specimen of a species that rarely gets this big or this old; foresters have estimated it at somewhere between 250 and 350 years, old enough to have been a mature tree when the Habsburg empire still ran this part of Europe. An information plaque was put up at the site after the win, and for years a geocache route led hikers up the hillside path to find it.
That geocache was archived in 2014, its owner citing deteriorated trail conditions rather than any problem with the tree itself, and no dated photograph or local report has surfaced since to confirm the pine is still standing. Slovakia's oldest pines are not the country's most closely watched trees, and one two decades removed from its moment of fame can go quiet in the record without anything having actually happened to it.
The pin here marks the hillside area rather than the exact trunk: the tree's own coordinates come from a photograph's location tag, not from a source that names the precise spot. If you have walked up and seen it recently, we would like to know.
Wild Apple Tree (Malus sylvestris) · 150 years · Diel hillside, Žiar (roughly 15 km from Veľké Borové)
By most accounts, nobody planted the second-best tree in Europe. The wild apple on the hill called Diel, above Žiar, may have grown from a seed a bird dropped, or from an apple core somebody threw away at the edge of a field.
In 2026 it finished second in European Tree of the Year with 4,766 points, behind Lithuania's Oak of Laukiai and ahead of Poland's Crooked Tree. That is Slovakia's best result in the contest; the previous best was third place, in 2016. It qualified by winning Slovakia's own Tree of the Year for 2025, with 4,345 of more than 18,000 votes.
It is not big. The trunk is 242 cm round and the tree is about eight metres tall, a wild apple in a contest dominated by oaks, limes and beeches. It stands alone at the far edge of a field that villagers worked by hand for generations, on a windswept shoulder of the Western Tatras foothills at 860 metres. For about 150 years it has taken the mountain wind, frost and drought with no orchard care and no protection.
What it has instead is people. One resident told Pravda that their grandfather remembered the tree from his childhood, and that today they walk up to it themselves.
It stands on open farmland rather than in a park, and no gate or fee is recorded; keep to the field edge. It is about 15 km from Veľké Borové's pine, a drive and then a walk uphill.