The Araucaria of Plaza de Galicia

Alicante's own walking route for its notable trees calls this the tallest on it: fifty metres, by the city's tree catalogue and by the contractor who maintains it, both citing the same figure independently. That number is worth a raised eyebrow rather than blind repetition: mature Cook pines rarely clear sixty to sixty five metres even in their native New Caledonia, and a cultivated specimen approaching fifty would be exceptional almost anywhere on Earth. It is what the city says, recorded as the city says it. Planted by municipal gardeners sometime in the 1970s, though the two sources disagree by five years on exactly when. Araucaria columnaris grows as a single arrow-straight spire, its lower branches long since shed and replaced by short awl-shaped shoots pressed close against the trunk. Captain Cook noted the species on his third voyage and guessed, wrongly, that trunks this straight would make fine ship masts; New Caledonian Cook pine wood turns out to be too brittle for the job. Plaza de Galicia opened as a public square in 1969, at the seaward end of Parque de Canalejas, on ground that had been a gas works. No gate, no closing hour. A few steps from the tree's base stands a small grove of three centenary olives, sharing the same open plaza.