The Aleppo Pine of the Torre Girona Gardens

Aleppo pines are the trees that come back after fire, their cones prised open by the heat, colonising burnt Mediterranean hillsides faster than anything else growing on them. This one has spent 122 years doing the opposite: standing beside an ornamental pond in Pedralbes with water, room and nothing to compete with, reaching 23 metres, which makes it the tallest of the three protected trees in the Torre Girona gardens. It was planted around 1904 on the estate the banker Manuel Girona built in 1860, and the city catalogued it in 1994 with a trunk of 2.9 metres round. A Catalan gardens journal describes a Pinus halepensis climbing the slope beside the pond's viewpoint here, which is exactly where the register's coordinate puts it. The species is the default pine of this coastline, the one on every dry hill between Barcelona and Provence, and that is precisely what makes an old one worth the walk. In the wild an Aleppo pine rarely gets to grow into its full shape, because fire, thin soil and competition tend to take it first. Same caution as its neighbours: the garden is public and city managed since 2019, but the hours are posted and seasonal and the gates shut at night.