What is the oldest tree in Alicante?
Alicante's oldest tree is the Ficus de Benalua, over 150 years old by the city's own figure and the widest trunk on this page by far. It stands a kilometre south of the city-centre figs, saved twice from removal: once when the city built a health centre next to it and moved the planned car park to protect its roots, and earlier still when a proposal to transplant it across the barrio was fought off by its own neighbours. Among the nine city-centre figs, only Ficus Gabriel Miro II has a published age, about 120 years, the thickest of the four Moreton Bay figs on Plaza Gabriel Miro. The rest carry no individual date.
Ages are the weak part of the record here, and it is worth knowing why. The Valencian catalogue lists most of these fourteen figs with a girth, a height and a crown spread, and no planting date, because it measures trees rather than dates them. Two exceptions exist. The city government's own record for the Ficus de Benalua states an age over 150 years, tied to a documented planting: a sapling taken before 1860 from what is now the Jardin Botanico and replanted in the garden of the old Chalet de Grau, where it has stood since. And local reporting fills the gap for the thickest fig on Plaza Gabriel Miro, which todoalicante puts at about 120 years old on a canopy of almost forty metres, against a rounder 170 with no measurement behind it. For the rest there is only the setting: Parque de Canalejas was designed in 1886, the Gabriel Miro square took its present shape in 1918, and the station forecourt fig stands at what a 2026 report calls a century-old intersection, a fact about the site rather than a date for the tree. All fourteen stand on free, open ground, none of them gated.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.