The Carob of the Viaduct

Gaudi built stone columns shaped like tree trunks all through Park Guell, and left this real one standing in the middle of them. The carob was already rooted on the hillside, born around 1893, when Eusebi Guell hired Gaudi to turn the estate into a garden city in 1900. Rather than clear it for the viaduct he was designing, Gaudi ran the structure's sloped stone columns around the living trunk, so a real tree grows inside a colonnade built to look like a forest of them. A 1904 photograph by the Barcelona photographer Josep Maria Armengol shows the arrangement barely a year after construction finished, the young carob still slender among the new stonework. Carob trees are Mediterranean natives that shrug off drought and poor soil, exactly the terrain Guell's estate offered before Gaudi arrived. More than a century later the tree has thickened into the columns around it, an unplanned collaboration between a 19th century Catalan Modernist and a species that was growing on that slope long before he was born.