The Pine of Veľké Borové

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.