The Regrown Carob of Placa de la Natura

This tree is technically a stump's second act. A carob once stood on this spot in Park Guell with a trunk more than four metres around, large enough to rank among the biggest of its species anywhere in the park. At some point it died back or was cut, and rather than disappear, it sent up a new shoot from the base, the way carobs and many Mediterranean trees regenerate after fire or damage. That shoot, catalogued as having sprouted around 1907, is the tree standing today, a modest 90 centimetres around, ringed by the twisted, weathered remains of the giant it replaced. The effect looks almost deliberately designed, a young trunk framed by the sculptural wreckage of its parent, in a park where Gaudi's actual stonework does the same thing on purpose elsewhere. Nobody plans a regrowth like this. The old carob's dead wood simply happened to curve the way Gaudi's stone columns do a few hundred metres away, which is either coincidence or proof that this particular hillside only knows how to grow one way.