The Ficus of Plaza de Calvo Sotelo

Every June, the neighbourhood association wraps this fig in fireproof tarps before setting fire to the plaza around it. Plaza de Calvo Sotelo hosts one of Alicante's Fogueres bonfires, the city's answer to Valencia's Fallas, and the fig stands close enough to the pyre that its crown has been scorched more than once. In 2026 the flames got through anyway and burned back part of the canopy, prompting residents to ask the city for better protection. The bonfire commission's own history describes shielding the tree every year since around 2013, which makes it a fixture of the festival rather than a bystander to it. It shares the square with the Araucaria already on this page, but it never made the city's list of protected monumental ficus, the same catalogue that covers the six-tree cluster in Parque de Canalejas and the grove at Portal de Elche. No plaque names it, no register measures it, and neither source willing to call it centenario says which fig it actually is. Alicante's other monumental specimens are mostly Ficus macrophylla, so that is the reasonable guess, but nobody has confirmed it. If you can tell one fig from another, we would like to know. Free and unfenced, on the same corner where the barrio burns its monument each June and plants a new one straight after.