(Disclosure/Reproduction)
This vegetable chubby has a name and address: it is known as the Tule tree and is located in the village of the same name in the city of Oaxaca, in the heart of Mexico. That plump tree is a cypress of the Taxodium mucronatum species, whose stem is no less than 58 meters in circumference, which requires 17 people, hand in hand and arms wide open, to go around its trunk. If it were hollow, a comfortable house could be built inside the trunk.
Botanists believe that the Tule tree is between 1430 and 1600 years old, but they don’t know how much longer it has to live. “There are no historical records or scientific data to know how many years it can live. But it is known that the cypress does not stop growing with age”, says botanist Bruno Irgan, from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). To prevent the Tule tree from having the same fate as another giant Mexican cypress, El Sargento – which could not resist the drying of the soil and pollution -, an irrigation system was built to water it and an iron fence to protect it. -there.