The Red Gum of the Placa de les Caramelles

Close to 30 metres of Australian tree stands in the Raval, the most tightly built neighbourhood in Barcelona and close to the last place with room for anything this size. The river red gum grew up inside the walled grounds of the Casa de la Caritat, the charity house that took in the city's foundlings and destitute for a century and a half, which is the only reason there was open soil here at all. From Placa de les Caramelles you get the whole thing: a pale straight trunk about three metres around, bare for a long way up before the crown begins. Eucalyptus camaldulensis follows the seasonal rivers of inland Australia across almost the entire continent, surviving drought by shedding whole limbs and resprouting from the base, which is also why nobody sensible parks under one. The buildings around it reopened in 1994 as the CCCB arts centre, the same year the city added the tree to its catalogue. Its age is the soft part of the record. The city gives 1904, no independent source confirms it, and the city's own two published versions of the same entry differ by three metres in height and 20 centimetres in girth. Read the date as the register's best guess.