Ficus del Passeig de Canalejas

Eleven and a half metres round the base, and nothing else on this walk comes close. The Ficus del Passeig de Canalejas is one of the few trees in the Valencian catalogue carrying a name of its own instead of a number, and the measurements back it up: 11.59 metres of girth, 20.8 metres of height, a crown 38.7 metres across the paseo. The park around it was laid out in 1886 to a design by the architect González Altés, on the strip between the Explanada de España and what is now the sports marina. The Gabriel Miró square a few minutes north took its present shape in 1918; this ground was drawn thirty years earlier, and its figs have had the time to show it. Trunks that twist and fold, aerial roots let down from the limbs and grown thick enough to stand as second and third trunks, surface roots running out in slabs between the benches. One local account puts it plainly: these trees have accompanied several generations of Alicante residents. Nobody has dated this one individually. The register measures rather than dates, and the park's Moreton Bay figs are described collectively as over a hundred years old. By El Español's count six of them stand here, alongside eleven Ficus nitida, which is reason enough to walk the paseo slowly.