Ficus of Parque de Canalejas (north)

Four Moreton Bay figs from the same nineteenth-century planting stand within forty metres of each other at Plaza Portal de Elche, and the trunks do not agree on how to grow. This one is the slender member of the group: 3.9 metres round against six to seven metres on its three neighbours, though at 14 metres tall with a 19 metre crown it holds its own overhead. The plaza takes its name from a gate that once stood in the city wall here, on the road out toward Elche, torn down with the rest of Alicante's fortifications in the nineteenth century. What replaced the gate was greenery: this grove of figs has been pruned and maintained by the council for well over a century, including a heavy 2014 to 2015 pruning that made the local press under the headline "the elegant resurgence of the Portal de Elche figs." Alicante's regional catalogue lists it as a monumental tree of local interest, unnamed beyond its register number. Nobody has dated the individual tree; the park itself opened in 1886, and its figs are generally put at more than a century old, which is the honest range rather than a birthday. Free, public, about ten minutes on foot from the Luceros tram stop.