The Stone Pine of the Palau de Pedralbes Gardens

The tree came first. This stone pine was planted in 1893 on the Can Feliu farmland that later became the Finca Guell estate, and it was already thirty years old when the property passed to the city in the 1920s and the house on it became the Barcelona residence of Alfonso XIII. When Nicolau M. Rubio i Tuduri redesigned the grounds between 1925 and 1927, he built his plan around the pine rather than the other way round: it stands alone in the meadow beside the palace, next to a sculpted female figure, holding the open space by itself. It is 24 metres tall on a trunk three and a half metres round, and Barcelona catalogued it as a Tree of Local Interest in 1993. What it has watched from that one spot: a farm turned into an estate, an estate turned into a royal residence, a king who left in 1931 when the Second Republic arrived and never came back, and a palace that has spent the decades since as a museum. Stone pines are the umbrella pines of the Mediterranean coast, built to stand in the open with all their weight carried in a flat crown, and this one has had the room to do it properly for 133 years. Most trees in this city spend their lives competing for light with a building.