The Hackberry of Jardins dels Drets Humans

Barcelona protected twelve trees across the city in one sitting in May 2024, and this hackberry in the Jardins dels Drets Humans was one of them, cited for size rather than age: a 2.9 metre girth and a 20 metre crown, broad enough to shade a good stretch of the garden's paths. It shares the garden with a much bigger, older-looking neighbour, a silky oak roughly 130 metres away, and together the two give the Human Rights garden two catalogued trees where most Barcelona parks have none. The garden itself is younger than either tree pretends to be: it opened to the public only in 2007, on land that had belonged to Philips' local factory since the 1960s, when a company landscape architect first laid the grounds out so workers could take their breaks outside. Celtis australis is one of the most common street trees in the Mediterranean, tough enough for Barcelona's hot, dry summers and long prized for wood that bends without splitting, historically worked into whip handles and walking sticks. No planting date survives for this one. If you know it, the garden's own records do not.