The Horse Chestnut of Placa Carles Buigas

Barcelona's register of trees of local interest runs past two hundred entries and contains exactly one horse chestnut. This is it, and the date on it is 1937, which was not a good year to be planting anything in this city. The air raids on Barcelona ran through that year and the next, and the hill directly above the square held anti-aircraft positions. The tree went in anyway and now stands 20 metres tall with a trunk 1.9 metres around, a decent size for a species that does not really belong at this latitude. Aesculus hippocastanum comes from a few mountain valleys in the Balkans, wants cool damp summers, and tends to sulk in Mediterranean cities, going brown at the edges by August in a hard year. This one has managed 89 seasons of it. It shares Placa de Carles Buigas with a tipu tree that is also on the register, so the two are one stop rather than two, on the walk up from Espanya towards the Montjuic gardens. The conkers are why the tree travelled so far beyond its native range in the first place and why generations of children knew it by name: shiny, useless, and briefly the most valuable object in a schoolyard.