The Pepper Tree of Carrer Joaquim Blume

Nobody quite agrees what this tree is. The city register files it as Schinus longifolia, an Argentine and Uruguayan species. The mappers at OpenStreetMap have it down as Schinus polygama, the Chilean huingan, and the Catalan name the register itself uses for the tree, huingan, belongs to that second one. The two are close relatives in the cashew family, both small, tough, drought-hardy South American trees, and separating them takes a look at the leaves and the thorns rather than a look at the label. So the species stays an open question here. The date does not. It was planted in 1916, which makes it older than most of the street around it and one of the oldest trees in Poble-sec, and the city catalogued it in 1996. It is a small thing by the standards of this list: eight metres tall, a 1.6 metre trunk, a crown about as wide as the tree is high, standing at the foot of Montjuic. The hill above it was torn up and rebuilt twice in its lifetime, for the 1929 International Exposition and again for the 1992 Olympics, and the street kept its tree through both. The genus is the one that gives pink peppercorns, though this is not the species in the grinder.