The Centenary Elms of Panteón de Quijano

Dutch elm disease took most of Europe's elms and never arrived here. A 2013 Diario Información survey of Alicante's biggest and oldest trees lists the elms of Plaza de Santa Teresa among the specimens that have dodged the diseases, and says the fungus that cleared elms out of country after country never reached the city. What nearly finished them was rot from the inside. Andrés Medrano, then running the municipal gardening workshop school, described the emergency surgery these trunks needed in 1990: the wood was rotten and the crews worked in masks. The trees came through it, and he was still pointing at them twenty-three years later. The same survey places them in the nineteenth century and calls them typical of the romantic gardens of that era, planted as a group rather than as showpieces, which is how they still read. Nobody has published a count of them, nobody has taped a trunk, and they carry no register entry of their own. If you know how many stand here, tell us. Their garden is the Panteón de Quijano, a memorial built between 1855 and 1857, with an obelisk at the centre and the last monkey puzzle in the city standing beside it. Iron railing, a staircase up from the plaza, open through the day.