The slimmest trunk on the square carries the second-widest crown on it. The Valencian register puts this fig at 6.4 metres round, the least of the four, and 19 metres tall, also the least, and then gives it a canopy 35 metres across. The other three went up. This one went sideways. That is worth standing under. A low, wide Moreton Bay fig brings its horizontal limbs within a few metres of your head, and the aerial roots it drops from them hang in the space you are walking through. Where one reaches soil it thickens, takes weight, and in time stops being a root at all and becomes part of the trunk. The Valencian catalogue treats each of these four figs as a monument in its own right, with its own entry and its own measurements rather than one line for the group. That reflects what a visitor actually finds on the square: four large trees of one species, none of them a copy of the others, one tall and narrow, one enormous in every direction, one middling and one that spread out at head height. No planting date survives for this one. The four are described together as over a century old, and that is the honest range.
This tree looks much the same in every month of the year, so there is no season to chart.
Plaza Gabriel Miró, AlicanteThe lowest and widest of the four, nineteen metres tall with thirty-five metres of canopy on the slimmest trunk on the square, six and a half metres round. It stands on the western side, about twenty metres from the thickest fig.
Free, open public plaza in the city centre, no gate or opening hours
TRAM Luceros stop (lines L1-L4), roughly 10 minutes on foot
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- In the official register: Catálogo de Árboles Monumentales y Singulares de la Comunitat Valenciana (Generalitat Valenciana), no. 3037
- dadesobertes.gva.es
- alicantepress.com
- alicante.es
- Generalitat Valenciana, Catalogo de Arboles Monumentales y Singulares de la Comunitat Valenciana (Ley 4/2006), no. 3037