The Canary Island Palms of the Vil.la Amelia Gardens

The city register counts fourteen. The garden's own chronicler counts fifteen. Either a palm has been lost since the catalogue was written, or one tree in the row is something else, and rather than quietly pick a number we would rather say which part we do not know. What is not in dispute: a double line of Canary Island date palms, planted around 1894, flanking the main avenue of the Vil.la Amelia gardens like a colonnade with a path down the middle. They stand 19 metres tall, roughly 2.3 metres round at the trunk, and Barcelona catalogued them together as a single protected item in 1994. Standing at one end and looking down the avenue is the whole point of them: one Phoenix canariensis is a palm, but 14 of them at 130 years old are architecture. The species comes from the Canary Islands and has had a hard century on the mainland, where the red palm weevil has killed date palms in large numbers since it arrived, which makes an intact avenue of century-old specimens less ordinary than it looks. These were planted while the garden was still the private Quinta Amelia. They survived the expropriation of the estate and the demolition of its mansion, and they now line a path anyone can walk for free.