The Ficus de Benalúa

The oldest fig in Alicante grew from a sapling taken before 1860 from the city's Agricultural Research plot, ground that is now the Jardín Botánico. It was replanted in the garden of a private house, the Chalet de Grau, and never moved again, even as everything around it did: the chalet became a shelter for minors, the shelter closed and was demolished in 1998, and the plot sat empty for years before the city decided to build a health centre on it. The first plans put a car park under its crown. Neighbours in Benalúa organised against it, and the city moved the twenty-four parking spaces to the far side of the building instead, folding the tree into a small garden by the entrance. It was the tree's second rescue. An earlier mayor had once proposed lifting it whole to Plaza de Navarro Rodrigo, a few streets away, a transplant residents fought off as too risky for a tree already past its first century. The city's own figure for the trunk is a startling 23.7 metres round, measured over the fused apron of aerial roots that a Ficus macrophylla grows once it settles in for a century. The regional government's monumental tree register, which measures the clean trunk beneath the roots, gives 14.69 metres instead, still the widest on any Alicante page. Either way, at over 150 years old, it is the oldest and thickest fig the city has.