The Holm Oak of the Bacardi Gardens

This oak is the only part of a rich man's garden that was never sold, demolished or built over. The land was a farm called Can Ermengol until the Bacardi family bought it late in the 19th century and put up a manor house for Baltasar de Bacardi i Janer, with grounds laid out purely for his own recreation. The oak went in around 1904. When his granddaughter Anna Bacardi i Ribas died in 1958, her three children began breaking the estate up and selling it; the house came down for the widening of Travessera de les Corts, and in 1963 the city expropriated what was left of the garden and opened it to everyone who had never been allowed in. The oak now stands roughly 16 metres tall with a trunk just over two metres around, among palms and plane trees left from the same private planting, five minutes from the Camp Nou crowds. Holm oaks keep their small hard leaves all year and grow slowly enough that a century leaves them looking unhurried. Barcelona catalogued this one in 1994, which means it cannot be removed for any reason, and that turned out to be a useful piece of paper: in April 2026 the city approved a redesign of the whole site around it.