The Avocado of Placa de Can Bruixa

There is an avocado tree 17 metres tall growing in a square in Les Corts. Persea americana is a Central American species that Europe imports by the container and almost never plants, because it wants heat, water and no frost, and because a tree grown from a stone takes a decade or more to fruit and then usually disappoints whoever planted it. This one went into the ground in 1945 and has not moved since, on Placa de Can Bruixa, in a district Barcelona had annexed from its own village only in 1897. Its trunk is slight at 80 centimetres around, and the height is the surprising part: an avocado that nobody prunes for picking simply goes up, which is why commercial groves keep theirs cut low and wide. The city catalogued it as a Tree of Local Interest in 2003. It stands about 500 metres from the magnolia in the old Maternity Gardens, which makes the pair a comfortable half hour on foot through a part of the city that almost no visitor reaches. Whether it sets fruit in a given year depends on the winter it has just had, and when it does the crop is well above head height and staying there.