Seven metres of trunk holding up thirteen metres of tree. That ratio is the reason to stop here: the Valencian catalogue measures this fig at 7.05 metres round and only 13 metres tall, with a crown of 16, so from the path it reads as a wide grey mass at ground level with a fairly modest tree on top of it. On a Moreton Bay fig the trunk is not really one stem. Aerial roots come down from the limbs, meet the soil, thicken, take load and fuse into the column, so a girth figure on this species measures the result of a process rather than a single stem that grew outwards. Seven metres of it is a lot of process. The register lists this tree without a name, as a monumental tree of local interest, one of four standing within about twenty-five metres of each other. Nobody has dated it. What it has is the age the park has: Parque de Canalejas was laid out in 1886 and its Moreton Bay figs are described as more than a century old, which is a range rather than a birthday. The park is free, open and a couple of minutes' walk from the four big figs on Plaza Gabriel Miró.
This tree looks much the same in every month of the year, so there is no season to chart.
Plaza Portal de Elche, AlicanteThe squat one of the pair: a trunk seven metres round under a tree only thirteen metres tall, with a small crown for its bulk. Its neighbour about twenty metres to the west is taller and slimmer.
Free, public park/plaza area, no gate found
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. 301
- dadesobertes.gva.es
- elespanol.com
- alicante.es
- Generalitat Valenciana, Catalogo de Arboles Monumentales y Singulares de la Comunitat Valenciana (Ley 4/2006), no. 301