The Gomero de la Recoleta

One branch of this fig reaches thirty metres out from the trunk and is over a metre thick where it leaves it. Since 2014 a sculpture of Atlas, welded from car parts by the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Arbiza Brianza, has stood underneath it appearing to take the weight. The city government calls this the oldest tree in Buenos Aires, and nobody agrees on how it got here. One account has the Recoleto friars planting it around 1718. Another credits the agronomist Martin Jose de Altolaguirre, who kept an orchard of exotic species on this ground around 1781. Either version puts it here before Argentina was a country, a few metres from the gate of the Recoleta cemetery, watching two centuries of the city arrive to bury its dead. The species is disputed as well. Porteños call it a gomero, a loose word attached to several big figs in Argentina. The city's own register describes Ficus macrophylla, the Moreton Bay fig, and its account of the leaves and fruit fits that; Wikidata files the same tree as Ficus elastica, the rubber tree. We have gone with the register and flagged the disagreement rather than settling it. The measurements need reading carefully too. The seven metres quoted across its trunk is the buttressed, fused mass a strangler fig builds over time, not a single round stem, so the girth figure here is far larger than any ordinary waistline.