Hundred-Horse Chestnut

On the eastern slopes of Mount Etna, in the village of Sant'Alfio, stands what is believed to be one of the oldest and largest trees in Europe: the Hundred-Horse Chestnut (Castagno dei Cento Cavalli), a sweet chestnut whose age botanists estimate at between 2,000 and 4,000 years. The Turin botanist Bruno Peyronel suggested that it could be three to four thousand years old, which would make it the oldest tree on the continent.

Above ground the tree has divided into several massive trunks that share a single root system, so that what looks like a small grove is in fact one living organism. When it was measured in 1780 its trunk had a circumference of 57.9 m, a figure recorded by Guinness World Records as the greatest tree girth ever measured. It grows on the fertile volcanic soils of the mountain about 8 km from the summit crater, in a landscape of chestnut woods.

Its name comes from a legend. Local tradition holds that a queen, usually identified as Joanna of Castile, was riding on Etna with a retinue of a hundred knights when a violent thunderstorm broke, and that the whole company found shelter beneath the branches of this single tree. The chestnut was also an early object of legal protection: in 1745 the Sicilian authorities issued a formal act to safeguard it, one of the first conservation measures on the island. The tree has long attracted poets and travellers, and it appears in Richard Powers' novel The Overstory (2018).

Getting there

The Hundred-Horse Chestnut stands in Sant'Alfio on the eastern slope of Mount Etna, in the province of Catania. The nearest town is Giarre, about 5 km away, on the coastal railway between Catania and Messina. The nearest airport is Catania-Fontanarossa (CTA), about 32 km away.