The Coral Tree of the Laribal Path

Barcelona cannot decide what this tree is. The city's own tree pages call it Erythrina corallodendron and say it is the only one of its kind in any garden in the city. The city's open data file calls it Erythrina falcata. The surveyor who mapped it for OpenStreetMap wrote down Erythrina lysistemon. Three names for one trunk, and all three are coral trees, a genus that flowers in blazing red spikes and has kept botanists arguing for two centuries. What nobody disputes is the tree. It stands on the path running between the Teatre Grec gardens and the Laribal gardens, planted around 1923, and it has thrown a crown twenty metres wide over a walkway barely three metres across, so the path goes underneath it rather than around. The trunk is 2.7 metres round and leans out over the slope. The city credits the placement to Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, the French landscape engineer who terraced this side of Montjuic for the 1929 Exposition, and notes that the tree was given an ideal spot and duly took advantage of it. Whatever it turns out to be, there is only one here.