The Wild Olive of Park Guell

The city's own register dates this wild olive to 1771, which would make it older than the tree Barcelona calls its oldest. That title belongs to the holm oak in Gracia at about 250 years, and the oak has something this olive does not: a dendrochronologist's count of its rings. The olive carries an approximate birth year typed into a municipal catalogue with nothing published behind it. So the honest position is that Barcelona may hold an older tree than the one it advertises, and nobody has done the work to settle it. What is not in question is the tree itself. It is an ullastre, the wild form of the olive that grows all round the Mediterranean as a low, scrubby, many-stemmed thing nobody looks at twice, and this one went up like a proper tree instead, somewhere between 14 and 17 metres with a crown spreading over 13 metres above a Park Guell retaining wall. That is why it was catalogued in 1996: not for its age, but because a species every Catalan can name had never been seen behaving like this. It was already on the hillside more than a century before Eusebi Guell bought the land.