The Plane Trees of Jardines de Albia

A photograph from the 1940s shows these plane trees already standing clear of the five-storey buildings around them. They still do. Jardines de Albia is barely 4,500 square metres, one block of green in Bilbao's Abando district, and the trees are what the Bilbao daily Deia reached for in 2023 when it called the square almost unchanged: grandes plataneros, more than a hundred years old, grown to the height of the facades that enclose them. Stand in front of the Antonio Trueba statue, put up in 1892, and you get the whole square at once: bronze poet, gravel, crowns closing overhead. The place has been named three different things in its life, Jardines de Albia, Plaza de Trueba and Jardines de Berastegui, and people here still use all three. What nobody has done is measure one of these trees. No source names an individual specimen, gives it a girth or records when it went in, so the age is what that 1940s photograph will carry and nothing more: over a century, not a figure anyone has taken a tape to. Read the pin the same way. The coordinates are the square's, not any one trunk's, which matters less here than usual because the square is the thing you came to stand in. If you know when Albia was planted, or which of these planes is the oldest, tell us.