The Centenary Olives of Plaza de Galicia

Three olives stand close enough together in Plaza de Galicia to read as one small grove: the thickest just over three metres round, the other two a little more than half that. A 2013 newspaper survey of the city's biggest and oldest trees called all three centenary and left it there, no year count attached to any of them, which is the honest state of the record. Olea europaea resists being dated by girth alone. The species survives fire, drought and heavy pruning by suckering back from its own base, so an old grove often turns out to be one tree that slowly became several, or several planted close enough to eventually read as one. Groves like this were common around Spanish towns and country estates for the better part of a century before anyone thought to write down when they went in. The regional monumental-tree register lists all three individually, with their own girths, and no planting date, the same silence that covers most of Alicante's monumental figs: a register built to measure a tree rather than to date it. Plaza de Galicia opened as a public square in 1969, on the site of a former gas works, at the seaward end of Parque de Canalejas. Free, unfenced, no closing hour. A soaring Cook pine, one of the tallest trees on the city's own singular-trees route, stands a few steps away.