The oldest olive tree in the world

In a quiet village in Crete there is an olive tree that was already ancient when Rome was a swamp. It is still alive. It still makes olives. It has watched the entire human story go by from the same spot — and it has never once looked up.

Its name is the Olive Tree of Vouves, and it stands in Ano Vouves, near Kolymvari, in the west of Crete. People drive across the island to put their hands on it. The trunk is not a trunk so much as a frozen explosion — 4.6 metres across, 12.5 metres around, folded and twisted like melted wax, like rope, like something poured rather than grown. And out of the top of that impossible old body come slim green branches, every spring, carrying small dark olives, as if none of it were remarkable at all.

Nobody knows how old it is. That’s the point.

You cannot carbon-date it. The heartwood that would hold its rings rotted away centuries ago — a hollowing-out that is itself a sign of monstrous age — so the number is half measurement, half reverence. Tree-ring analysis of what remains proves it is at least 2,000 years old. Scientists from the University of Crete have put it at around 4,000. Take the middle and it does not matter: whatever the figure, this tree was alive before almost everything you have ever read about.

While we did all of that, it made olives

Think about what that band actually contains. When this tree was a sapling, the Minoans were painting dolphins on the walls of Knossos and bronze was the cutting edge of technology. It was already more than a thousand years old when the first athletes ran at Olympia. It was roughly half the age it is now — about two thousand years old — when a carpenter’s son was born in a Roman province a short boat-ride away, and the calendar everyone now argues over reset to zero. The tree did not notice. It made olives that year too.

Rome rose and fell while it stood there. The library at Alexandria burned. Empires you have heard of and empires you haven’t came through Crete with swords — Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Venetians, Ottomans — each certain they were the important thing happening. The Black Death emptied half of Europe. The Inquisition lit its fires. Kings were crowned and beheaded; gods were invented and abandoned; we crossed oceans, split the atom, and walked on the moon. And this old motherfucker just sat in its field in Crete, every single spring, quietly turning sunlight into fruit, watching the chill kid from Galilee become an entire civilisation and then watching that civilisation do what civilisations do.

The one thing that might finally get it

Here is the part that stops me. In four thousand years — through every drought, every army, every fire — the thing that now threatens this tree is not a sword or a plague. It is us, slowly, by accident, changing the temperature of the entire planet. The Mediterranean is heating and drying faster than almost anywhere; the summers that olives have always loved are tipping over into summers that even olives can’t take. For the first time in its unimaginable life, the danger to the oldest olive tree in the world is the weather — and that one is on us. We turned up at the very end of its story and started quietly trying to fuck it up.

And yet. It is protected now, declared a natural monument in 1997. There is a small museum beside it. It is still grafted, still tended, still fruiting — and in 2004 and again in 2008 its branches were cut and woven into the wreaths laid on the heads of the Olympic marathon champions, so that the oldest living olive tree crowned the fastest living humans. That is the whole of the olive in one image, really: something patient and ancient and unbought, quietly outlasting all our noise.

If you are ever in Crete, go and stand in front of it. Put your hand on the bark. Four thousand springs are in there, and it is not finished. It is, as far as it is concerned, just getting on with the only thing it has ever done. That’s what I’m talking about.

Sources & further reading: Olive Tree of Vouves — Wikipedia · the Olive Tree Museum of Vouves. Age figures are estimates: tree-ring analysis confirms a minimum of ~2,000 years; the ~4,000-year figure is the University of Crete estimate. Dates of historical events are approximate, chosen to sit honestly against that range.

The other contenders, and how much to believe

Vouves is the most visited claimant, but it is not the only one, and the honest starting point is that nobody can date the oldest olive trees with real precision. An olive hollows itself out as it ages: the heartwood rots away, the tree carries on from a shell of living outer wood and from fresh shoots at the base. There is no continuous ring record left to count. Every headline figure below is an estimate from trunk girth, growth-rate modelling or local tradition, and girth is a poor clock in a species that regenerates from its own roots.

So which is actually the oldest? On present evidence the truthful answer is that no one knows, and anyone giving you a confident single number is repeating a tourist board rather than a measurement. Vouves has the strongest combination of scientific support, size and documented history, which is why it wears the title in practice. Bshaale has the biggest number and the least evidence behind it.

What is not in doubt is the underlying fact, and it is the more interesting one: a species whose individuals can plausibly outlive entire civilisations, and go on setting fruit while doing it. On the mechanics of that endurance see why olive trees live so long and olive tree lifespan.

The oldest olive tree: common questions