The One You Couldn’t Hear Across

In the forest of Ampanonga, near Bevoay along the Mangoky river, hundreds of baobabs grow, some of them a thousand years old or more. The most famous among them for generations was Tsitakakoike, a giant with a trunk 27.30 metres in circumference, radiocarbon-dated to somewhere between 1,300 and 1,500 years old. Its name is its own description: in Malagasy, Tsitakakoike means that if you shout on one side of the trunk, the sound cannot be heard on the other.

A trunk so wide, a shout couldn’t cross it.

That single, vivid image, a cry swallowed by its own girth, is what carried Tsitakakoike’s name across the region and beyond it, well past the more modest fame of any other individual tree nearby. For a long time, it stood as the giant everyone in the area measured every other baobab against, the reference point rather than merely one more ancient tree among hundreds.

Tsitakakoike’s fame outran its measurements. Not far away, in the village of Andombiry, stood Tsitakakantsa, a baobab with a trunk measured at 28.98 metres in circumference, larger than its better-known neighbor by more than a metre and a half. Further south, near Mangolovolo, 23 kilometres northeast of Morombe, stands another giant measured at 28.9 metres around, nicknamed the “Sumo” baobab by the Japanese visitors who gave it its name, and cited by some as the true largest baobab on the island.

None of this ever dethroned Tsitakakoike in popular memory, because a title like “biggest baobab in Madagascar” turns out to travel on story more than on measurement. A name that means something, repeated by generations of guides and villagers, outlasts a metric advantage of a few dozen centimetres almost every time. Size alone rarely wins a reputation contest against a good story.

At the end of February 2018, Tsitakakoike partially broke apart and collapsed, leaving roughly 40 percent of its trunk and canopy still standing. Baobabs do not die the way hardwood trees do: their trunks are largely water by weight, and once internal rot sets in, they tend to fracture and come down quickly rather than declining slowly over years the way an oak or a baobab’s harder-wooded cousins might.

A village doesn’t just lose a tree. It loses a place to pray.

The loss left a real gap for the communities who had treated the tree as more than scenery, a refuge for prayer and ancestral rites where people sought protection and blessing. In its place, the village of Andombiry designated Tsitakakantsa, the larger, less famous tree nearby, as Tsitakakoike’s spiritual successor, transferring the role rather than simply mourning an empty space where a giant had stood.

As of the most recent reporting available in 2026, Tsitakakantsa itself is now dying. A nature guide, Wilfred Ramahafaly, first noticed dark seepage at the tree’s base in August 2025. By October, researcher Cyrille Cornu documented a musty odor and dark, foul-smelling liquid leaking from the trunk. Large cracks appeared in February 2026, and a major branch fell soon after, prompting a fuller diagnosis. By May 2026, roughly half the tree had already come down. Experts point to a fungal infection, likely worsened by heavy rain and tropical storms intensified by climate change, exploiting the same water-heavy trunk structure that made Tsitakakoike’s own collapse so sudden eight years earlier.

“You can’t imagine one day your parent will not be with you.”

For the village of Andombiry, this is not a first loss but a second one, arriving on the tree they had specifically chosen to carry the role forward. Village chief Mampiavy described what the tree meant plainly: it “brought many blessings to the villages and inhabitants.” Researcher Onja Razanamaro put the loss in starker terms still: “You can’t imagine one day your parent will not be with you.” Local tourism operators in the region have described the successive deaths of these giants as a page of the Grand South-West’s identity turning, a loss that measurements in metres of circumference were never really built to capture in the first place.