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27 April 2005
Jose Elosegi and one of his son’s, Miguel with what remains of the Aritz
Aundia Oak.
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The great oak of Aritz Aundia
In 1898, ten years after the great oak of Aritz Aundia near the town of
Leiza, Navarra split apart and fell down, Jose Elosegi’s great grandfather
took a photo of it with some of his family.
On the 100th anniversary of its great fall, the Elosegi family and the
local village people of Leiza, planted a replacement tree on the same spot
that the tree used to stand and surrounded it with stones laid out to mark
the extent of the trunk of the original tree. Their estimates of the great
tree’s size were based on the report that it took more than 8 men with arms
outstretched to reach round the girth. At the same time they put up a
memorial stone showing the old pictures to give people an idea of what it
looked like over a century ago.
Today two great limbs are still very much in evidence, gradually
disintegrating into the soil. How many more years will it take and how many
more generations of the Elosegi family before it has disappeared completely?
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